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THE    GENTLEMAN 


BY    GEORGE   H.    CALVERT 


BOSTON 
TICKNOR     AND     FIELDS 

1863 


Entered  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  1363,  by 

GRORGE  H.  CALVERT, 

In  the  Clerk's  Office  of  the  District  Court  for  the  District  of  Rhode 
Island. 


THIRD    EDITION. 


RIVERSIDE,  CAMBRIDGE: 
STEREOTYPED  AND  PRINTED  BY  H.  0.  UOCGHTON. 


CONTENTS. 


I. 

MM 

Introductory  —  Etymological  —  Prelusive         ...      7 

II. 

Bayard — Sidney — Moral  Freedom — Esthetic  Element     19 

m. 

Charles  Lamb  —  George  IV.  —  Princes    ....    32 

IV. 

Leicester  —  Hampden  —  "Washington  —  Napoleon  —  St. 
Paul 48 

V. 

The  Ancients  —  Christian  Influence  —  Roman  Senate  — 
The  Duel  —  Banquet  of  Plato  —  Position  of  Women 
Among  the  Ancients 59 

VI. 

Cesar  —  Brutus  —  Socrates  —  Grecian  Mythology  —  Ho- 
meric Heroes  —  Ideals  .......  71 

VII. 

Shakspeare's  Historical  Plays  —  Prospero  —  Orlando  — 
Antonio  —  The  Real  Married  to  the  Ideal  —  Sir  Roger 


vi  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

de  Coverley —  My  Uncle  Toby  —  Don  Quixote  —  Scott 

—  Coleridge  —  Shelley  —  Byron  —  High-bred  Tone  in 
Writing  —  Burns — Keats  —  Shakspeare      .        .        .84 

VIII. 

The  Moral  and  the  Poetical  —  Their  Alliance  in  Gentle- 
manhood —  The  Generic  —  The  "Liberal"  Professions 

—  Impartiality  of  Nature  —  Manners  —  Lord  Chester- 
field         105 

EX. 

Honor  —  Personality  —  Pride  and  Vanity  —  Fashion  — 
Vulgarity 122 

X. 

Various  Kinds  of  aentlemen  —  Fragments  —  Ladyhood 

—  Conclusion .139 


THE    GENTLEMAN. 
I. 

INTRODUCTORY — ETYMOLOGICAL  —  PRELUSIVE. 

word  gentleman  recurs  four  hundred 
and  fifty-two  times  in  Shakspeare, — an 
iteration  which  proves  broad  acknowledg- 
ment in  that  day  of  the  thing  signified. 
For  every  ten  utterances,  through  type  or 
speech,  of  this  magnetic  word  in  the  six- 
teenth century,  there  are  ten  thousand  in  the 
nineteenth.  During  these  three  centuries,  it 
has  spread  over  new  continents,  with  the  pro- 
lific expansive  British  race,  its  growth  out- 
stripping a  hundred  fold  even  that  of  popu- 
lation. Whoso  should  happen  to  pass  through 
the  Five  Points  hi  New  York,  or  the  Seven 
Dials  in  London,  at  the  moment  of  an  a«o- 
tion,  would  hear  the  watchful  orator  of  the 


8  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

assemblage  offer  the  appellative,  "  gentlemen," 
to  his  ragged  auditors,  not  more  glibly  than  by 
them  it  would  be  accepted. 

Let  no  bedressed,  bescented  passer  curl  his 
lip  at  this  impudent  theft  of  an  epithet  claimed 
as  property  of  his  favored  few.  On  the  part 
of  the  auctioneer  there  is  no  theft :  on  the  part 
of  the  scornful  passer  there  may  be  usurpa- 
tion. The  auctioneer  necessarily,  unconscious- 
ly, speaks  under  sway  of  the  advanced  senti- 
ment, which  recognizes  that  within  every 
Christian  heart  live  the  germs  of  that  high 
Ideal,  the  manifestation  of  which  in  moving, 
incorporate  reality  receives  the  choice  name 
of  gentleman.  The  universal  giving  and  ac- 
cepting of  this  name  is  a  homage  to  the  beau- 
ty of  what  the  name  represents, — an  aspira- 
tion, however  remote  and  modest,  for  the  pos- 
session of  the  refined  substance. 

Among  the  passages  in  old  English  authors, 
cited  by  Richardson,  to  illustrate  his  definition 
of  gentleman,  is  the  following  from  Spenser's 
View  of  the  State  of  Ireland :  — "  If  he 
can  derive  himself  from  any  sept,  (as  most  of 


ETYMOLOGICAL.  9 

them  can,  they  are  so  expert  by  their  bardes,) 
then  he  holdeth  himself  a  gentleman,  and  there- 
fore scorneth  to  worke,  or  use  any  harde  la- 
boure,  which,  he  saith,  is  the  life  of  a  peasant 
or  churle  ;  but  thenceforth  becometh  either  an 
horseboy  or  a  stocah  (attendant)  to  some  kerne, 
inuring  himself  to  his  weapon,  and  to  the  gen-  / 
tlemanly  trade  of  stealing,  —  as  they  count  it." 
A  little  scrutiny  discovers  in  this  sentence  more 
than  meets  the  eye,  matter  apt  to  our  purpose. 
In  the  first  place,  the  need  of  derivation  from 
a  sept  or  clan,  as  the  foundation  of  gentleman- 
hood,  wafts  us  up  to  the  far  etymological  nest 
of  a  brood  of  well-plumed  vocables,  namely,  to 
the  Latin  word  gens,  which  primitively  meant  /  /  / 
stem,  stock,  being  more  comprehensive  than 
familia,  family.  Thus  the  gens  Cornelia  em-  ]) 
braced  several  great  families,  those  of  the 
Scipios,  the  Lentuli,  and  others.  To  belong 
to  a  gens  was  a  high  distinction,  an  ennoble- 
ment. So  Horace  calls  ignobilis,  one  who 
could  claim  no  affinity  with  these  stocks,  homo 
sine  gente,  a  man  without  stem.  So  significant 
of  rank  did  the  word  gens  become,  that  not 


10  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

only  was  it  used  by  the  Romans  to  designate 
their  two  classes  of  Patricians,  but  likewise 
their  two  classes  of  gods,  the  one  being  Dii 
majorum  gentium,  the  other  Dii  minorum 
gentium.  From  such  remote  source  spring 
the  melodious  modern  words,  gentile  and  gen- 
tiluomo  in  Italian,  gentil  and  gentilhombre  in 
Spanish,  gentil  and  gentilhomme  in  French, 
gentle  and  gentleman  in  English. 

So  much  for  etymology.  Let  us  return  to 
the  Spenserian  passage.  "  If  he  can  derive 
himself  from  any  sept,  (which  corresponds  to 
the  Latin  gens,)  then  he  holdeth  himself  a  gen- 
tleman." With  the  modern  Europeans,  and 
their  American  off-shoots,  as  with  the  ancient 

I/T 
Romans,  high  public  service  conferring  social 

>  \rank,  a  man  whose  preeminence  above  his  con- 
temporaries makes  him  historically  illustrious, 
sheds  part  of  his  lustre,  and  transmits  his  well- 
won  position  to  his  descendants ;  and  they  hold 
this  position,  often  for  centuries,  through  the 
right  of  inherited  possession,  through  the  cul- 
ture acquired  by  association  from  birth  with 

V 

the  more  privileged  and  refined,  and  at  times 


PRELUSIVE.  11 

through  the  exhibition  of  some  of  the  qualities, 
•which  elevated  the  founder,  high  mental  qual- 
ities, as  well  as  low,  being  transmissible  through 
the  blood. 

But  now  conies  into  play  the  law  of  com 
pensation, —  that  law  so  terrible  and  so  just; 
and  the  inheritors,  exposed  —  in  addition  to 
the  ordinary  fallibilities  of  human  nature, 
—  to  the  temptations  peculiar  to  all  advan- 
tages that  have  not  been  self-earned,  be- 
come often  the  victims  of  good  fortune,  and 
lapse  languidly  back  into  the  undistinguished 
crowd  out  of  which  their  original  creative  pro- 
genitor had  by  native  energy  lifted  himself;, 
so  that  a  Duke  of  Norfolk  who,  towards  the 
end  of  the  last  century,  wished  to  celebrate 
with  a  great  family-gathering  the  third  centen- 
nial anniversary  of  the  date  of  his  Dukedom, 
finding  not  only  that  he  had  several  thousand 
poor  relations,  but  that  some  of  them  had  to 
be  picked  out  of  ditches,  and  from  even  lower 
places,  gave  up  his  proud  purpose,  disgusted 
at  the  degeneracy  and  the  numerousness  of  his 
kin. 


12  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

Taking  up  again  the  passage  from  Spenser, 
the  next  link  we  find  to  be,  —  "  And  therefore 
scorneth  to  worke  or  use  any  harde  laboure, 
which  he  saith  is  the  life  of  a  peasant  or 
churle."  Partly  from  the  freedom  implied  in 
/•the  non-necessity  of  work,  dispensing,  as  that 
freedom  does,  leisure  for  mental  husbandry ; 
partly  from  the  fact,  that  daily  agricultural 
and  mechanical  labor,  as  commonly  practised, 
starves  the  larger  faculties,  monopolizing  for 
the  smaller  the  brain's  activity,  and  thus  tends 
to  keep  the  mind  ignorant  and  the  habits 
coarse ;  the  notion  that  gentlemanhood  and 
work  are  antagonistic  is  so  deeply  rooted, 
that  even  at  the  present  day,  and  in  our 
own  country,  you  will  hear  men  talk  of  leav- 
ing off  work  and  turning  gentlemen.  In  Con- 
tinental Europe,  only  such  work  as  is  required 
in  the  higher  offices  of  State  and  Church  is 
deemed  consistent  with  the  dignity  of  a  gen- 
tleman; and  even  in  industrious,  commercial 
England,  a  merchant  is  not  admitted  at  Court. 

In  Europe,  from  the  over-worked,  stinted, 
still  semi-servile  peasantry,  up  to  the  sover- 


PRELUSIVE.  13 

eign,  there  is  a  graduated  ascent.  The  peas- 
ant is  looked  down  upon  by  the  journeyman-  - 
mechanic  ;  the  latter  stands  similarly  lowered  _. 
in  the  eyes  of  a  tradesman,  who  throws  an  up- 
ward regard  on  the  merchant  from  whom  he  . 
buys.  But  we  need  not  wander  to  Europe  ; 
we  have  the  same  gradation,  notwithstanding 
that  through  the  priceless  possession  of  politi- 
cal equality  we  are  all  lifted  to  one  high  com- 
mon level  of  manhood.  Observe  that  the 
principle  of  this  gradation  is  the  compara- 
tively higher  intellectuality  and  the  wider  com- 
prehensiveness compassed  on  each  ascended 
step.  The  field-laborer's  work  is  simple  and 
monotonous  and  feebly  intellectual,  and  is  done 
under  direction.  To  buy  and  sell  by  the  yard 
needs  less  thought  and  reach  of  combination 
than  to  buy  and  sell  by  the  cargo.  Some  me- 
chanic processes  are  more  subtile  than  others. 
What  we  term  the  "liberal  professions,"  are  sa 
termed  on  account  of  the  amount  and  kind  of 
acquirement,  the  variety  of  knowledge,  and  the 
intellectual  discipline  that  are  pre-requisites  to 
entrance  into  them.  The  scorn,  therefore,  of 


14  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

Spenser's  Irish  loafer,  in  addition  to  the  lazi- 
ness characteristic  of  a  loafer,  may  be  regard- 
ed as  representing  a  mingled  feeling  of  dis- 
taste to  brutalizing  servile  labor,  and  of  aspi- 
ration for  the  freedom  which  other  conditions 
promise.  .. 

But  not  only  he  scorneth  to  work,  "but 
thenceforth  becometh  either  an  horseboy  or  a 
stocah  (attendant)  to  some  kerne,  (Irish  foot- 
soldier,)  inuring  himself  to  his  weapon,  and  to 
the  gentlemanly  trade  of  stealing,  —  as  they 
count  it."  In  those  contentious  sword-and- 
buckler  days,  when  roads  were  few  and  bad, 
and  constables  inadequate,  an  Irish  horseboy 
had  privileges  and  perquisites  not  enjoyed  by 
his  successors  ;  and  that  foot-soldiers  had  at- 
tendants seems  to  imply  a  light,  marauding 
life,  where  opportunities  were  good  for  dining 
without  earning  a  dinner.  You  observe  that 
this  gentleman  founds  his  vocation  upon  his 
blood  ;  for  it  was  only  when  he,  by  a  fanciful 
amplification  of  finest  filaments  into  tough 
cords,  could  bind  himself  to  an  old  family, 
that  he  felt  entitled  to  scorn  work  and  be- 


PRELUSIVE.  15 

take  him  "  to  the  gentlemanly  trade  of  steal- 
ing." 

Nor  should  we  be  too  hard  upon  this  ter- 
raqueous buccaneer,  this  ancient  Hibernian 
Bedouin,  who  imagined  himself  a  gentleman. 
The  civilized  nineteenth  century  engenders  im- 
aginations not  less  bewrayed.  Nor  need  we 
cross  the  Atlantic  to  find  his  present  counter- 
part in  higher  strata  of  the  social  crust,  —  in 
individuals  who,  within  the  pale  of  the  statute 
and  without  violent  infraction  of  the  usages  of 
trade,  do  virtually  steal,  or  suck  and  grind  the 
poor,  or  blow  attainting  breath  on  female  pu- 
rity, or,  under  the  aegis  of  legal  forms,  defraud 
justice  of  her  dues ;  and  who,  nevertheless, 
are  met  in  the  circles  of  fashion,  and  pass 
there  for  gentlemen.  Since  Spenser's  day, 
many  forward  and  upward  steps  have  been 
made  ;  but  still  palpable  in  the  social  as  in 
other  provinces  of  life  is  the  usurpation  of 
form  over  substance,  of  appearance  over  re- 
ality, of  sight  over  insight,  of  seem  over  be. 

In  our  endeavor  to  thrust  aside  some  of  the 
veils  that  obscure  our  subject,  to  cleanse  it  of 


16  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

the  cheap  varnish  that  defaces  a  solid,  brilliant 
ground,  let  us  go  back  for  a  few  moments  more 
to  the  learned,  invaluable  Richardson,  who, 
with  his  searching  exhaustive  industry,  under 
the  head  of  gent  and  its  derivatives,  gives 
more  than  eighty  citations  out  of  English  au- 
thors, from  Robert  of  Glocester  and  Piers 
Plowman  to  Gray  and  Gibbon.  Roger  As- 
cham,  a  generation  further  from  us  than  Spen- 
ser, noted  for  his  acquirements,  the  valued  tu- 
tor of  Queen  Elizabeth,  says  in  his  ScJiole 
Master, — "Some  in  France,  which  will  needs 
be  jentlemen,  whether  men  will  or  no,  and 
have  more  jentleshippe  in  their  hat  than  their 
head,  be  at  deadlie  feude  with  both  learning 
and  honestie."  Haberdashery  and  patent- 
leather,  in  and  out  of  France,  are  formidable 
adjuncts  to  much  of  modern  "jentleshippe;" 
and  a  fair  relation  of  the  part  played  by  vel- 
vet and  satin  in  the  social  history  of  Christen- 
dom were  a  sprightly  satire.  Clothes  have 
ever  striven  to  symbolize  gentlemanhood ;  and 
how  well  they  have  succeeded  and  continue  to 
succeed,  we  have  a  gross  example  in  the  tri- 


PRELUSIVE.  17 

umphant  hypocrisy  of  the  costly,  super-fash- 
ionable dressing  of  the  managers  and  decoys 
of  luxurious  gambling-halls,  and  of  the  better 
class  of  pickpockets.  The  chief  tailor  of 
Antwerp,  —  a  man  zealous  and  accomplished 
in  his  craft,  —  once  said  to  me,  complaining  of 
a  wealthy  customer,  —  and  he  spoke  with  ear- 
nestness and  sympathy, — "  Mr. does  not 

do  himself  justice ;  that  last  froc  I  made  him 
is  threadbare  ;  and  you  know,  sir,  a  gentleman 
is  known  by  his  clothes."  A  somewhat  hyper- 
professional  magnification  of  tailorship.  But 
the  shrewd,  lively  man  perhaps  felt,  that  the 
"  jentleshippe  "  of  many  of  his  well-born  cus- 
tomers did  not  lie  so  subterrenely  deep,  but  that 
it  might  be  largely  aided  by  the  virtue  there 
was  in  the  laying  on  of  his  proficient  hands ; 
and  in  his  pride  of  calling  was  ready  to  de- 
clare, with  a  wider  application  than  Polonius, 
—  "  The  apparel  oft  proclaims  the  man." 

One  more  citation  from  Richardson,  drawn 
out  of  still  deeper  recesses  of  the  past,  from 
the  very  well-head  of  English  poetry, —  a  brief 
sentence,  fraught  with  that  homely  wisdom 


18  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

which  has  so  much  helped  to  keep  the  name 
of  Chaucer  fresh  for  five  centuries.  It  is  from 
The  Persone's  (Parson's)  Tale:  —  "Also  to 
have  pride  of  gentrie  is  right  gret  folie ;  for 
ofttime  the  gentrie  of  the  bodie  benimeth  (tak- 
eth  away)  the  gentrie  of  the  soule  ;  and  also 
we  ben  all  of  one  fader  and  one  moder."  I 
am  tempted  to  add  other  four  lines  of  Chau- 
cer, from  The  Clerke's  Tale,  not  quoted  by 
Richardson :  — 

"  For  God  it  wot,  that  children  often  ben 
Unlike  hir  worthy  eldres  hem  before : 
Bountee  cometh  al  of  God,  not  of  the  stren 
Of  which  they  ben  ygendred  and  ybore." 


n. 

BAYARD  —  SIDNEY — MORAL  FREEDOM — ESTHETIC  ELEMENT. 

"DUT  now,  leaving  sententious  judgments 
and  the  abstract  brevities  of  definition, 
let  us,  in  our  endeavor  to  comprehend  gen- 
tlemanhood,  confront  it  concretely,  and  bring 
before  our  minds  the  two  foremost  gentle- 
men of  Christendom,  —  the  Chevalier  Bay- 
ard and  Sir  Philip  Sidney.  The  lives  and 
characters  of  these  two,  —  even  briefly  sketch- 
ed as  they  must  be  here,  —  by  presenting  in 
fullest  actuality  the  moving,  speaking  gentle- 
man, will  help  us  to  deduce  what  is  his  in- 
terior, essential  nature. 

And  first,  as  coming  first  in  time,  the  "  Good       / 
Knight,  without  fear  and  without  reproach."      ( 
Born  in  the  South  of  France,  towards  the  end 
of  the  fifteenth  century,  when  Chivalry  still 
survived  in  its  forms  and  usages,  from  which 
had  died  out  the  Christian  spirit,  when  gross 


20 

living  and  rapaciousness  and  perfidy  were  char- 
acteristics of  knights  and  nobles  and  sover- 
eigns, the  Chevalier  Bayard,  by  the  splendor 
and  the  uninfected  purity  of  his  nature,  shone 
amid  the  corruptions  and  affectations  of  de- 
cay, an  example  of  loyalty,  of  self-sacrifice, 
of  generosity,  of  unclouded  honor,  of  roman- 
tic courage,  that  in  the  healthiest  days  of 
Chivalry  would  have  made  him,  amid  the  no- 
blest and  most  chivalrous,  a  model  of  knight- 
hood. So  uniquely  towering  was  his  fame, 
that  high-spirited  adversaries,  who  in  their  ex- 
tremity would  have  died  rather  than  yield 
them,  were  proud  to  drop  the  point  of  their 
swords,  as  from  behind  the  opponent's  closed 
vizor  they  heard  the  name  of  Bayard. 

When  the  French  had  taken  Brescia,  in 
Lombardy,  and  he  lay  for  several  weeks 
wounded  in  the  house  of  a  wealthy  citizen, 
who  had  fled,  he  refused  the  large  custom- 
ary ransom  which  the  wife  brought  him,  as 
he  was  about  to  depart,  and,  sending  for  her 
two  daughters,  divided  the  sum  between  them. 
On  another  occasion,  after  sternly  rebuking  a 


BAYARD.  21 

base,  impoverished  mother,  who  would  have 
sold  him  her  child,  he  gave  the  daughter  a 
portion  that  enabled  her  to  espouse  her  lover. 
Having,  by  a  shrewd,  bold  movement,  cap- 
tured from  the  enemy  fifteen  thousand  gold 

ducats,  he  bestowed  one  half  of  them  on  his 

\ 
Lieutenant,  —  thereby   enriching    him,  —  and 

divided   the   other  half  among  his   followers. 

Nor  was  this  an  isolated  act  of  munificence.    It 

. 

was  his  habit,  not  only  to  share  his  purse  with 
his  friends,  but  to  give  away  the  many  sums 
that  came  to  him  in  presents  and  prizes.  And 
while  he  was  as  affable  as  he  was  brave,  he  ^ 
was  as  just  as  he  was  liberal.  Gifted  in  rare 
measure  with  the  sterling  qualities  for  com- 
mand, he  was  cheerful  in  obedience  to  su- 
periors. Never  subject  to  the  ignoble  gnaw- 
ings  of  envy,  he  enjoyed  as  he  did  his  own 
the  triumphs  of  companions.  Many  contem- 
porary knights  were  sans  peur  ;  he  alone  was 
sans  reproche.  So  true  and  great  was  the 
soul  of  Bayard,  that  the  noblest  and  purest 
grow  nobler  and  purer  in  the  glow  of  its  per- 
petual light. 


22  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

About  eighty  years  later  than  Bayard,  was 
born  his  English  competitor,  Sir  Philip  Sidney, 
one  of  the  glories  of  the  resplendent  reign  of 
Queen  Elizabeth, — a  power,  although  so  short* 
lived,  among  the  potencies  that  bear  the  immor- 
tal names  of  Shakspeare,  of  Bacon,  of  Raleigh, 
of  Spenser,  of  Howard,  of  Drake,  of  Ben  Jon- 
son.  Precocious,  like  Bayard, — who,  dying  on 
the  field  of  battle  at  forty-eight,  was  thirty-four 
years  a  soldier,  —  Sidney,  born  in  an  epoch  of 
general  and  deep  intellectual  ferment,  at  the 
age  when  Bayard  donned  armor,  entered,  the 
classmate  of  Raleigh  and  Spenser,  the  Uni- 
versity of  Oxford,  where  his  young  mind,  at 
once  quick  and  capacious,  fed  on  every  kind  \ 
of  knowledge,  and  sought  preeminence  in 
whatever  is  attainable  by  genius  and  labor. 
On  quitting  Oxford,  at  eighteen,  he  set  out  in 
a  brilliant  company  on  a  tour  of  travel,  going 
first  to  Paris,  where  his  bearing  and  conversa- 
tion fascinated  the  King,  Charles  IX.,  and  the 
young  King  of  Navarre,  afterwards  Henry  IV. 
From  France  he  journeyed  through  Germany 
to  Italy,  consorting  with  the  most  learned  and 


SIDNEY.  23 

accomplished  of  those  countries.  At  Padua 
he  made  acquaintance  with  the  renowned  poet,  V^ 
Tasso ;  and  Scipio  Gentilis,  a  famous  scholar 
of  Italy,  inscribed  to  him  a  Latin  transla- 
tion of  Tasso's  Jerusalem  Delivered.  Later, 
Hakluyt  and  the  learned  Lipsius  dedicated 
works  to  him  in  terms  of  cordial  eulogium. 
On  his  return  to  England,  he  became  the  de- 
light of  the  English  Court,  to  which,  says 
Fuller,  "  He  was  so  essential,  that  it  seemed 
maimed  without  his  company,  being  a  com- 
plete master  of  matter  and  language."  Queen 
Elizabeth  called  him  her  Philip.  The  follow- 
ing year,  although  only  twenty-two,  he  went 
ambassador  to  Germany  and  Poland,  acquit- 
ting himself  so  well  as  to  draw  high  praise 
even  from  the  severe,  exacting  Burleigh. 
Among  his  friends  and  admirers  was  the 
great  Prince  of  Orange  ;  and  Don  John  of  Aus- 
tria, though  hating  all  heretics,  was  won  by  his 
manners  and  attainments.  For  a  time  he  rep- 
resented his  native  county  in  Parliament ;  and, 
finally,  in  1586,  he  joined  his  uncle,  the  Earl 
of  Leicester,  in  a  campaign  in  the  Netherlands 


24  THE   GENTLEMAN, 

as  General  of  Horse ;  and  here,  at  the  battle 
of  Zutphen,  when  only  thirty-two,  he  fell,  mor- 
tally wounded. 

For  so  brief  a  career,  one  externally  more 
brilliant  was  never  run  by  a  candidate  for 
fame.  When  in  years  not  much  more  than 
a  boy,  he  had  given  evidence  of  the  thought- 

,  fulness  and  address  of  a  statesman  ;  his  writ- 
A 
ings  prove  him  to  have  been  not  only  a  scholar 

V,  of  rare  and  varied  culture,  but  a  poet  of  gen- 
ius ;  and  the  field  of  Zutphen  showed  the  bud- 
ding of  a  brilliant  military  renown.  At  his 
death,  lamentation  went  up  over  Europe,  as  for 
the  loss  of  one  who  was  among  the  leaders  and 
ornaments  of  the  world. 

The  accomplishments  and  acquirements  of 
Sidney,  his  manners  and  conversation,  his  gen- 
ius and  his  personal  beauty,  are  still  not  suf- 
ficient to  account  for  the  universal  fascination, 
as  well  of  the  purest  as  of  the  most  accom- 
plished, and  for  the  general  so  cordial  grief  at 
his  death.  To  justify  the  love  and  the  hom- 
age he  inspired,  he  must  have  been  even  richer 
in  qualities  of  heart  than  in  intellectual  pow- 


SIDNEY.  25 

ers  and  attainments,  richer,  in  graces  than  in  / 
gifts.  And  that  he  was  so,  his  last  act  on  the 
day  he  received  his  death-wound  testifies,  re- 
vealing the  deep  beauty  of  his  nature,  and 
throwing  round  his  whole  being  a  saintly  halo. 
And  that  renowned  act  was  worthily  ushered  in 
by  another,  which  represents  the  buoyant  pulse 
and  generous  courage  of  youthful  life,  as  the 
final  one  does  the  holy  loveliness  of  self-denial 
while  life  was  fast  ebbing.  For,  as  he  came 
upon  the  field,  seeing  the  veteran  Lord  Mar- 
shal, Sir  William  Pelham,  lightly  armed,  with 
a  chivalrous  shame  that  he,  a  young  knight, 
should  be  so  much  better  protected,  he  threw 
off  his  cuishes ;  and  it  was  to  this,  what  we  \ 
may  term,  generous  deference  to  age,  and  no- 
ble self-regardlessness,  that  he  owed  his  wound ; 
for,  fighting  with  a  gallantry  that  drew  plaudits 
from  the  foe,  he  was  hit  in  the  thigh  by  a 
musket-ball.  As  he  was  borne  from  the  field, 
he  asked  for  water,  to  quench  the  raging  thirst 
caused  by  such  a  wound  ;  but,  as  he  lifted  the 
cup  to  his  lips,  observing  by  the  road-side  a 
dying  soldier,  who  threw  up  at  it  a  ghastly, 


26  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

wishful  look,  he  handed  the  cup  back  to  his  at- 
tendant to  give  it  to  the  soldier,  saying,  "  This 
man's  necessity  is  even  greater  than  mine." 

These  two  renowned  knights  illuminate  his- 
tory, as  the  representatives  of  gentlemanhood, 
— the  most  approved  gentlemen  of  Christen- 
dom ;  and  that  high  station  they  hold,  through 
strength  and  purity  of  soul  and  gentleness 
of  bearing.  Only  from  an  ever-lively,  inward 
fount  of  generous  ascendant  feeling  could  have 
flowed  in  both  such  simple  grandeur  of  con- 
duct married  to  such  radiance  of  demeanor. 

The  power  that  raised  them  to  preeminence, 
that  gave  a  daily  beauty  to  their  lives, — 
a  beauty  that  made  itself  felt,  —  was,  and 
could  be  nought  other  than  unselfishness. 
In  both  there  was  an  active,  despotic  self- 
forgetfulness.  In  them  so  large  and  manly 
was  the  soul,  that  it  gave  to  their  keen  en- 
ergies a  beneficent  drift.  Without  effort,  al- 
most without  purpose,  they  were  generous, 
compassionate,  magnanimous,  true,  and  out- 
wardly affable.  Such  high  qualities,  so  richly 
mingled,  imply  obliteration  of  the  me,  and  im- 


MORAL  FREEDOM.  27 

port  that  clear  moral  freedom  whose  robust  at- 
mosphere is  the  very  breath  of  the  highest 
type  of  gentlemanhood,  —  a  freedom  -which, 
imparting  spiritual  self-possession,  imparts  a 
force  greater  even  than  virtuous  self-control; 
for  this  constrains  and  sometimes  stiffens,  while  ^ 
that,  conferring  easy,  buoyant  dominion,  holds 
the  whole  being  so  in  poise  that  all  acts  have 
the  grace  and  dignity  of  unconscious  excel- 
lence,—  a  high-born  excellence  that  cannot  be 
counterfeited,  and  must  issue  from  a  deep,  cen- 
tral motion,  which  has  an  impetus  as  resistless 
as  that  of  the  subterranean  feeders  of  a  copi- 
ous, transparent  spring. 

Such  men  justify,  while  they  illustrate,  ideal 
embodiments.  Had  they  and  the  like  of  them 
never  lived,  the  narrative  that  is  now  a  vera- 
cious biography  would  to  most  men  seem  an 
unnatural  fiction.  They  are  mirrors  of  hu-  /. 
inanity,  which  show  man,  not  as  he  is  daily 
encountered,  but  magnified,  beautified,  trans- 
figured. And  yet,  being  flesh-and-blood  mor- 
tals, they  are  practical  exemplars,  breathing 
proofs,  of  what  moral  and  mannerly  heights 
men  can  attain  to. 


28  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

It  may  seem  that  I  am  overstating  the  moral 
element,  and  that  the  gentleman  is  rather  an 
-s.  aesthetic  than  an  ethic  personage.  It  is  this 
moral  element  which,  in  my  conception  of  the 
gentleman,  is  pivotal.  Dealing  now  with  the 
highest  type,  I  conceive,  that  in  that  type  not 
'tmly  are  morals  primary,  but  that  manners  re- 
v  suit  from  them  ;  so  that,  where  there  is  not  a 
solid  substratum  of  pure,  elevated  feeling,  there 
will  not,  there  cannot  be  a  clean,  high,  unaf- 
fected demeanor.  Had  Bayard,  with  the  fif- 
teen thousand  captured  ducats,  bought  for  him- 
self a  chateau  and  estate,  reserving  the  ran- 
som offered  by  the  Brescian  matron  as  a  where- 
with to  furnish  it,  Fame  would  not  have  bla- 
zoned to  the  latest  time  a  French  soldier  with 
the  unique  eulogium,  —  "The  Good  Knight, 
without  fear  and  without  reproach."  The  heart 
that  was  so  large  and  gracious  as  to  command 
his  acts  of  sublime  disinterestedness,  shaped, 
with  ks  profuse,  inexhaustible  warmth,  his  out- 
ward bearing  into  kindliness  and  sympathetic 
tenderness,  as  surely  as  the  healthful  play  of 
sound,  internal  organs  sends  to  the  skin  and  to 


AESTHETIC  ELEMENT.  29 

the  cheek  its  glistening  glow,  its  captivating 
bloom. 

But  the  aesthetic  element,  if  not  primary  in  / 
the  gentleman  of  the  highest  type,  is  essential 
to  him,  and  is  of  such  significance  in  gentle- 
manhood,  that  in  that  of  any  type  below  the 
highest  it  becomes  predominant,  as  will  here- 
after be  seen.  We  learn  from  their  record 
that  both  Bayard  and  Sidney  were  imbued 
with  its  spirit.  Sidney  was  a  poet  with  his 
pen,  and  Bayard,  had  his  education  been  liber- 
al, might  have  been  one,  too ;  for  the  lives  of  1  li 
both  were  poetry  in  action.  History  would  not  I 
have  gloried  in  them  as  she  does,  we  should 
not  be  busied  with  them  now,  had  they  not 
carried  in  their  breasts  that  eager,  insatiate 
longing  for  the  better,  which,  being  a  flame 
that  heats  the  feelings  into  their  widest  swing, 
/lifts  purity  into  grandeur,  goodness  into  mag- 
T  /  nanimity,  truth  into  heroism,  faith  into  martyr- 
dom. 

Through  a  scrutiny  of  these  two  protago- 
nists of  gentlemanhood,  we  get  an  insight  which 
justifies  already  certain  positions,  positive  and 


30  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

negative.     The  gentleman  is  built  from  within 
outward:  for  the  thorough  building  there  must 
lie  ready  stores  of  largeness  and  bounteous-  [ 
ness :  a  man  of  small  soul  can  only  be  a  gen- 
tleman in  a  superficial  sense :  whatever  station 
he  may  inherit,  with  whatever  varnish  of  man-   ; 
ners  he  may  glisten,  against  one  intensely  sel-    ) 
fish,  gentlemanhood  is  closed :  the  genuine  gen- 
tleman must  possess  a  good  degree  of  moral 
freedom ;  for  only  this  can  furnish  the  illumi- 
nation to  lead  the  footsteps  up  from  the  dark 
ways  of  the  petty  self:  the  gentleman  robes 
manliness  in  courtesy. 

Sidney  and  Bayard,  standing  emblazoned  on 
high,  historic  pedestals,  are  enlarged  by  the 
dusk  of  distance.  Champions  of  an  age  which 
the  imagination  has  permanently  colored  with 
beauties  and  grandeurs  and  marvels,  they  wear 
an  ideal  magnificence,  and  assume  to  our  eyes 
heroic  stature.  For  the  gold-grasping,  steam- 
driven  nineteenth  century  they  may  seem  not 
to  be  available  exemplars.  But  the  best  there 
is  in  life  looks  always  impracticable  until  per-, 
formed  ;  and  even  then  its  proportions  are  not 


ESTHETIC  ELEMENT.  31 

completely  appropriated  by  witnessing  con- 
temporaries ;  and  only  when  time  has  removed 
it,  do  later  generations  acknowledge  its  dues, 
investing  it  at  last  with  entire  glory,  and  some- 
times with  lineaments  mythological.  In  the 
great  acts  that  issue  freshly  out  of  what  is 
noblest  in  our  nature,  there  is  an  infiniteness 
of  good,  a  boundlessness  of  power,  which  need 
the  imaginative  vision  fully  to  compass  and 
even  to  behold.  Nor  can  the  imagination, 
creative  as  it  is,  forerun  or  anticipate  them. 
A  moment  before  the  act  of  handing  the  cup 
to  the  dying  soldier,  not  a  by-stander  could 
have  predicted  it, — it  was  as  yet  a  latent  ideal. 
The  moment  after,  it  was  a  lesson  to  humanity 
for  all  time,  —  a  sudden  flame  blazing  forth 
from  the  divine  there  is  in  man,  and  destined 
forever  to  attest  and  to  warm  that  indwelling 
divinity. 


in. 

CHARLES  LAMB  —  GEORGE  IV.  —  PRINCES. 

T  ET  us  not  be  too  diffident  to  believe  that, 
-^  wearing  other  costumes,  wielding  other 
weapons,  there  are  still  Bayards  and  Sidneys 
around  us.  To  nourish  this  belief,  we  will  re- 
call the  living  days  of  one,  who,  if  not  quite 
of  our  generation,  is,  through  his  contempo- 
raneous biographers,  as  minutely  known  as  our 
familiar  companions,  whose  life,  in  its  daily, 
superficial  struggles  and  labors,  was  as  com- 
monplace and  homely  as  that  of  the  dullest 
of  his  plodding  neighbors  ;  and  in  whom  there 
was  such  rare  capacity  of  heroism  and  tender- 
xl_ness  and  beauty,  that  his  character,  still  more 
than  even  his  exquisite  writings,  is  an  abiding 
joy  and  fortification  to  all,  whose  souls  have 
any  affinity  with  self-devotion,  any  susceptivity 
to  refinement. 

Charles  Lamb,  born  in  London  in  1775,  was 


CHARLES  LAMB.  33 

the  son  of  a  servant,  who,  during  an  almost 
lifelong  service,  so  won  the  esteem  and  af-  j 
fection  of  his  employer,  Mr.  Salt,  a  bencher 
of  the  Inner  Temple,  that  this  gentleman  ob- 
tained for  his  son  Charles  a  presentation  to 
Christ's  Hospital,  —  a  high,  richly-endowed 
Charity -School,  founded  by  Edward  VI. 
Here,  the  associate  of  Coleridge,  Lamb  re- 
mained from  his  eighth  to  his  fifteenth  year. 
At  seventeen  he  obtained  a  subordinate  clerk- 
ship, with  slender  salary,  in  the  East  India 
House,  where  he  continued,  rising  in  rank  and 
pay,  until  his  fiftieth  year,  when  he  was  allowed 
to  retire  on  a  liberal  pension,  which  he  enjoyed 
for  ten  years,  and  of  which,  by  another  act  of 
liberality  on  the  part  of  the  Directors  of  the 
East  India  Company,  his  sister  had  the  bene- 
fit, they  according  to  her  after  his  death  the 
portion  that  would  have  been  due  to  a  wife. 
Literature  was  the  delight  of  Lamb,  and  his 
solace.  Reading  the  best  old  books  and  con- 
sorting with  great  new  poets,  his  delicate  sen-\ 
sibility  and  subtle  intellect  were  so  cultivated, 
that,  notwithstanding  his  six  daily  hours  of  en- 

3 


34  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

chainment  to  the  "  dead  desk,"  he  made  an 
enduring  addition  to  English  Literature  in  the 
celebrated  Essays  of  Mia.  The  comrade  and 
correspondent  of  many  of  the  choice  spirits 
that  gave  renown,  and  will  give  its  best  im- 
mortality, to  the  brilliant  era  ushered  into  Eng- 
land by  the  nineteenth  century,  his  "  Wednes- 
day Evenings  "  were  frequented  by  Coleridge, 
Leigh  Hunt,  Godwin,  Charles  Kemble,  Hazlitt, 
Wordsworth,  De  Quincey,  Liston,  Proctor,  Tal- 
fourd.  Among  his  intimate  personal  friends 
were  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  Hazlitt  and 
Talfourd. 

We  have  thus  two  aspects  of  Lamb's  life: 
the  prosaic  and  the  poetic  ;  his  daily  neces- 
sary,—  what  the  Germans  would  call  bread- 
work,  —  and  his  luxurious,  intellectual,  crea- 
tive work.  The  third  and  deeper  life-current, 
the  domestic  and  moral,  in  Lamb's  case  not 
only  mingled  with,  modifying  and  modified  by, 
the  others,  but  by  its  purity  and  momentum, 
gave  to  his  being  its  marked  and  lofty  individ- 
uality. From  the  time  of  leaving  Christ's 
Hospital  he  lived  with  his  parents  and  sister 


CHARLES  LAMB.  35 

in  lodgings  near  Holborn.  When  he  was  twen- 
ty-one there  fell  on  him  and  his  a  fearful  ca- 
lamity, on  which  "  revolved  the  wheels  of  his 
after-life."  I  will  let  the  words  of  De  Quin- 
cey  relate  it :  — 

"  In  the  spring  of  1796,  Miss  Lamb,  (hav- 
ing previously  shown  signs  of  lunacy,)  in  a  sud- 
den paroxysm  of  her  disease,  seized  a  knife 
from  the  dinner-table  and  stabbed  her  mother, 
who  died  upon  the  spot.  A  coroner's  inquest 
easily  ascertained  the  nature  of  a  case  which 
was  transparent  in  all  its  circumstances,  and 
never  for  a  moment  indecisive  as  regarded  the 
medical  symptoms.  The  poor  young  lady  was 
transferred  to  the  establishment  for  lunatics  at 
Hoxton.  She  soon  recovered,  we  believe ;  but 
her  relapses  were  as  sudden  as  her  recoveries, 
and  she  continued  through  life  to  revisit,  for 
periods  of  uncertain  seclusion,  this  house  of 
woe.  This  calamity  of  his  fireside,  followed 
soon  after  by  the  death  of  his  father,  who  had 
for  some  time  been  in  a  state  of  imbecility,  de- 
termined the  future  destiny  of  Lamb.  Ap- 
prehending, with  the  perfect  grief  of  perfect 


36  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

love,  that  his  sister's  fate  was  sealed  for  life, 
—  viewing  her  as  his  own  greatest  benefac- 
tress, which  she  really  had  heen  through  her 
advantage  of  ten  years  of  age,  —  yielding 
with  impassioned  readiness  to  the  depth  of  his 
fraternal  affection,  what,  at  any  rate,  he  would 
have  yielded  to  the  sanctities  of  duty  as  in- 
terpreted by  his  own  conscience,  —  he  re- 
solved forever  to  resign  all  thoughts  of  mar- 
riage with  a  young  lady  whom  he  loved,  for- 
ever to  abandon  all  ambitious  projects  that 
might  have  tempted  him  into  uncertainties, 
humbly  to  content  himself  with  the  certainties 
of  his  Indian  clerkship,  to  dedicate  himself  for 
the  future  to  the  care  of  his  desolate  and  pros- 
trate sister,  and  to  leave  the  rest  to  God. 
These  sacrifices  he  made  in  no  hurry  or  tu- 
mult, but  deliberately  and  in  religious  tran- 
quillity. These  sacrifices  were  accepted  in 
heaven,  —  and  even  on  this  earth  they  had 
their  reward.  She,  for  whom  he  gave  up  all, 
in  turn  gave  up  all  for  him.  She  devoted  her- 
self to  his  comfort.  Many  times  she  returned 
to  the  lunatic  asylum,  but  many  times  she  waa 


CHARLES  LAMB.  37 

restored  to  illuminate  the  household  hearth  for 
him ;  and  of  the  happiness  which  for  forty 
years  or  more  he  had,  no  hour  seemed  true 
that  was  not  derived  from  her." 

The  wealth  of  man's  heart  consists  in  its 
power  of  giving.  He  who  can  make  the  most 
and  greatest  sacrifices  is  the  richest.  And  his 
wealth  does  not  support  and  enrich  others 
only ;  even  more  than  them  it  enriches  him- 
self; it  makes  him  opulent  with  spiritual  power. 
Or  rather,  the  spiritual  power  within  him  braces 
him  for  the  sacrifice,  —  nay,  by  its  easy  might, 
draws  out  of  the  deed  all  sacrificial  quality,  so 
that,  while  witnesses  are  admiring  it,  to  the 
doer  himself  it  is  an  act  facile  and  unstrained. 
This  early  one  of  dutifulness  deepened  and 
modulated  Lamb's  otherwise  rich  nature.  The 
warmth  of  an  overflowing  sympathy  it  tem- 
pered ;  the  colors  thrown  by  a  sportful  imagi- 
nation it  sobered ;  to  the  conceptions  of  a  sub- 
tle intellect  it  gave  breadth  and  substantiality. 
The  large,  lively  spring  whence  it  flowed  fed  a 
stream  that,  never  stagnating,  upbore  a  freight 
of  friendships  such  as  perhaps  no  other  man 


38  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

.ever  enjoyed.  '  And  this  was  the  effect  of  re- 
action. Lamb  gave  himself  with  a  cordiality 
and  fulness  that  were  unexampled.  His  ge- 
nial gentleness  drew  to  him  companions,  whom 
then  his  sympathetic  homogeneity  held  in  the 
bonds  of  admiration  and  love. 

Lamb's  courtesy  was  of  the  uncourtly,  un- 
studied sort,  the  fruit  of  an  ever-welling  kind- 
liness and  fellow-feeling.  All  who  approached 
felt  that  they  could  trust  him,  his  bearing  was 
so  frankly  modest,  his  politeness,  which  knew 
no  distinction  of  persons,  so  transparent.  I 
will  let  De  Quincey  finish  his  portrait,  in  a 
passage  which,  if  the  reader  has  not  seen  it, 
he  will  thank  me  for  opening  to  him,  and  if  he 
has,  for  bringing  again  to  his  view. 

"  He  was  a  man,  in  a  sense  more  eminent 
than  would  be  conceivable  by  many  people, 
princely,  —  nothing  short  of  that  in  his  benefi- 
cence. Many  liberal  people  I  have  known  in 
this  world,  many  who  were  charitable  in  the 
widest  sense,  many  munificent  people,  —  but 
never  any  one  upon  whom,  for  bounty,  indul- 
gence, and  forgiveness,  for  charitable  construe- 


CHARLES  LAMB,  39 

tion  of  doubtful  or  mixed  actions,  and  for  regal 
munificence,  you  might  have  thrown  yourself 
•with  so  absolute  a  reliance  as  upon  this  com- 
paratively poor  Charles  Lamb.  Considered  as 
a  man  of  genius,  he  was  not  in  the  very  first 
rank,  simply  because  his  range  was  a  con- 
tracted one ;  within  that  range  he  was  per- 
fect. Of  the  peculiar  powers  which  he  pos- 
sessed, he  has  left  to  the  world  as  exquisite  a 
specimen  as  this  planet  is  likely  to  exhibit. 
But,  as  a  moral  being,  in  the  total  compass  of 
his  relations  to  this  world's  duties,  in  .the  large- 
ness and  diffuseness  of  his  charity,  in  the  gra- 
ciousness  of  his  condescension  to  inferior  in- 
tellects, I  am  disposed,  after  a  deliberate  re- 
view of  my  own  entire  experience,  to  pro- 
nounce him  the  best  man,  the  nearest  in  his 
approaches  to  an  ideal  standard  of  excellence, 
that  I  have  known  or  read  of.  In  the  mingled 
purity,  —  a  childlike  purity,  —  and  the  benig- 
nity of  his  nature,  I  again  express  my  own 
deep  feeling  of  the  truth,  when  I  say  that  he 
recalled  to  my  mind  the  image  and  character 
of  St.  John  the  Evangelist,  —  of  him  who  was 


40  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

at  once  the  beloved  apostle,  and  also,  more 
peculiarly,  the  apostle  of  love.  Well  and 
truly,  therefore,  did  Wordsworth  say,  in  his 
beautiful  lines  upon  this  man's  grave  and 
memory,  — 

'  Oh,  he  was  good,  if  e'er  a  good  man  lived.'  " 

Such,  from  the  testimony  of  -weightiest  wit- 
nesses, was  Charles  Lamb.  When  England, 
ever  rich  in  gentlemen,  calls  the  long  roll  of 
the  strong,  glowing  men  that  make  her  life  so 
illustrious  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  present 
century, — not  among  the  titled  and  the  high- 
born, nor  beneath  stars  and  ribbons,  even 
those  the  most  worthily  earned,  nor  under 
plumes  and  epaulets,  nor  amid  the  less  as- 
piring ranks  of  refined  inherited  culture, — 
not  among  these  conspicuous,  practised  class- 
es, abounding  in  high  examples,  will  she  find 
her  best  model  of  the  Christian  gentleman ; 
him  she  must  seek  among  the  clerks  of  the 
India  House. 

It  happened,  that  a  short  time  before  his 
last  illness  Lamb  had  borrowed  of  the  trans- 
lator of  Dante,  —  the  Kev.  Henry  F.  Gary, 


CHARLES  LAMB.  41 

another  of  his  admiring  friends,  —  the  The- 
atrum  Poetarum  Anglicanorum  of  Philips. 
The  volume  was  not  returned  until  after  his 
death,  when,  finding  the  leaf  folded  at  the  ac- 
count of  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  Mr.  Gary  wrote 
the  following  lines  :  — 

"  So  should  it  be,  my  gentle  friend; 
Thy  leaf  last  closed  at  Sidney's  end. 
Thou  too,  like  Sidney,  wouldst  have  given 
The  water,  thirsting  and  near  heaven ; 
Nay,  were  it  wine,  filled  to  the  brim, 
Thou  hadst  looked  hard,  but  given,  like  him.  — 
And  art  thou  mingled  then  among 
Those  famous  sons  of  ancient  song? 
And  do  they  gather  round,  and  praise 
Thy  relish  of  their  nobler  lays  ? 
Waxing  in  mirth  to  hear  thee  tell 
With  what  strange  mortals  thou  didst  dwell; 
At  thy  quaint  sallies  more  delighted, 
Than  any's  long  among  them  lighted !  — 
^Tis  done:  and  thou  hast  joined  a  crew, 
To  whom  thy  soul  was  justly  due; 
And  yet  I  think,  where'er  thou  be, 
They'll  scarcely  love  thee  more  than  we." 

In  contrast  to  Charles  Lamb  was  his  highest 
contemporary.  But  here  I  must  first  disarm 
a  remark  of  Lamb's,  which  may  look  like  a  re- 
proof of  what  I  am  about  to  do.  In  an  epis- 


42  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

tolaiy  criticism  on  a  volume  of  poems,  sent 
him  by  his  friend,  Bernard  Barton,  the  Qua- 
ker poet,  he  says,  —  "I  do  not  quite  like 
whipping  the  Greek  Drama  upon  the  back  of 
Genesis.  I  do  not  like  praise  handed  in  by 
disparagement;  as  I  objected  to  a  side  cen- 
sure on  Byron  in  your  lines  on  Bloomfield." 
The  objection,  while  it  declares  a  sound  canon 
of  criticism,  is  otherwise  sweetly  characteristic 
of  Lamb  ;  and  were  my  main  object  here  the 
drawing  of  his  portrait,  it  would  be  good 
against  me,  and  should  stay  my  hand.  To 
aim  at  heightening  the  Vatican  Apollo  or  the 
Titian  Venus  by  putting  them  in  juxtaposition 
with  a  hunchback  or  a  hag,  were  surely  not 
more  offensive  than  futile.  But  as  the  sketch- 
es of  Lamb  and  others  are  secondary,  are  in- 
troduced as  purely  auxiliary  to  the  delineation 
of  the  Gentleman,  I  am  entirely  justified  in 
that  beside  positive  illustrations  of  gentleman- 
hood  I  place  others  that  are  negative.  To  do 
so  is  indispensable  to  the  accomplishment  of 
the  assumed  task. 
By  some  of  his  subjects  George  IV.  has 


GEORGE  IV.  48 

been  called  a  "  Brummagem  gentleman."  The 
epithet  is  not  the  exaggerated  utterance  of  re- 
action in  a  later,  healthier  period  against  the 
fulsomeness  and  perverseness  of  that  fevered, 
earlier  one,  so  vulgarized  as  to  term  him  the 
"  first  gentleman  of  Europe."  It  is  faithful 
and  discriminative.  As  Prince  of  Wales,  as 
Prince  Regent,  as  King,  he  showed  himself  to 
be  the  commonest  metal  glaringly  plated,  gor- 
geously gilt.  He  lacked  earnestness  and  moral 
inwardness.  There  were  no  depths  in  him  of 
evil  or  of  good.  Had  he  not  been  a  Prince, 
he  would  not  have  been  the  most  selfish  and 
the  most  frivolous  man  of  his  day.  He  was 
all  outside,  a  daily  renewed  product  of  tailors 
and  barbers  and  perfumers  and  haberdashers, 
elaborately  "  gotten  up,"  to  perform  the  chief 
part  at  balls  and  receptions  and  dinners,  to 
disport  in  the  shoals  of  life,  to  shine  in  cere- 
monials and  gairish  parade  and  superficialities 
and  wine-foamed  word-passages.  While  Eng- 
land was  straining  her  mighty  muscles  for  self- 
preservation,  and  her  Nelsons  and  Wellingtons 
were  wreathing  their  names  with  immortality 


44  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

by  rescuing  the  civilized  world  from  the  bloody 
grasp  of  the  Corsican  monster,  he,  an  occiden- 
tal Sardanapalus,  was  the  leader  of  Fashion 
in  his  capital,  the  competitor  of  dandies,  the 
rival  of  Brummels.  While  his  great  country 
was  reeling  under  the  weight  of  her  immense 
outlay,  feeding  the  leagued  armies  of  Europe, 
he  was  wasting  millions  on  frippery  and  per- 
ishable nothings,  on  gaudy  ostentations  and 
senile  sensualities,  —  his  annual  tailor's  bill 
amounting  to  a  sum  that  were  a  generous 
portion  for  a  baronet's  daughter. 

And  yet,  so  servile  to  rank  and  power,  so 
dimmed  in  moral  and  aesthetic  vision,  was  the 
titled  crowd  whereof  he  was  the  centre  and 
summit,  and  so  strong  the  glare  that  this 
crowd  threw  on  its  subordinate  thousands,  the 
liveried  lieges  of  Fashion,  that  by  his  gen- 
eration of  Anglo-Saxons  the  Prince  Regent 
was  admired  as  a  model  gentleman.  The  dy- 
nasty of  Chesterfield  had  not  yet  been  sup- 
planted. The  Prince  Regent  was  indeed  a 
regal  realization  of  the  Chesterfieldian  ideal, 
according  to  which,  hypocrisy  was  the  law  of 


PRINCES.  45 

manners,  and  worldliness  a  duty,  and  the  shal- 
low flatteries  of  courtly  speech,  factitious  con- 
ventionalities, fraudulent  phrases,  were  culti- 
vated, not  as  the  permissible  and  profitable 
externals  of  a  man  of  fashion,  but  were  of- 
fered and  accepted  as  the  credentials  of  a 
gentleman. 

But  while  thus  unsparing  towards  the  false 
gentleman,  let  us  be  charitable  towards  the 
man.  Kingship  is  not  favorable  to  manly 
virtues.  King's  sons  are  so  sequestered,  that 
the  airs  most  needful  to  mental  health  visit 
them  but  faintly.  The  high  walls  of  preroga- 
tive shut  off  the  north  winds  of  bracing  op- 
pugnancy,  the  east  winds  of  enkindling  de- 
rision. Oaks  cannot  be  raised  under  glass. 
Their  gnarled  grandeur  they  can  only  gain 
by  tussling  with  wintry  tempests.  The  qual- 
ities, whose  activity  moulds  the  character  into 
strength  and  beauty,  prefer  a  fair  field  and 
no  favor.  They  prosper  even  on  buffets.  The 
sons  of  a  king  are  denied  the  youthful  super- 
lative privilege  of  being  buffeted. 

A  Prince,  especially  a  Crown-Prince,  lacks 


46  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

fulcrums  whereon  to  adjust  the  lever  of  his 
abilities,  from  which  adjustment  comes  the 
enlivening  power  wherewith  men,  not  artifi- 
cially exalted,  swing  themselves  aloft.  Instead 
of  the  solid  indispensable  fulcrum,  the  Prince 
meets  yielding  cushions;  so  that  his  move- 
ments are  more  like  falls  than  self-achieved 
ascensions;  until,  —  unless  he  be  stiffened  by 
rare  rugged  energy,  or  winged  by  genius,  — 
he  ceases  to  make  efforts ;  and  forces,  that 
were  designed  to  be  toughened  by  conflict, 
grow  flaccid  from  the  obsequious  capitulation 
of  those  who  to  others  offer  a  determined,  but 
at  the  same  time  auxiliary,  because  stimulat- 
ing, opposition.  Self-help  is  the  law  of  all 
successful  life.  Soul  and  body  must  earn 
health,  or  else  not  have  it.-  From  this  law 
men  covet  exemption,  which  is,  to  covet  so 
much  death.  There  is  a  town  in  England,  — 
Bedford  I  think  it  is, — where,  owing  to  the 
number  and  wealth  of  charitable  foundations, 
so  many  mouths  are  gratuitously  fed,  that,  it 
is  stated,  the  mass  of  the  laboring  population 
has  sunk  into  apathetic  sloth.  The  pressure 


PRINCES.  47 

of  an  irregular  or  extreme  prosperity  is  as  un- 
propitious  as  that  of  an  extreme  poverty.  In 
either  case  nothing  but  exceptional  individual 
fire  bursts  through  the  incumbent  accumula- 
tion. 


IY. 

LEICESTER  —  HAMPDEN  —  WASHINGTON  —  NAPOLEON  —  ST.  PAUL. 

r\N  the  other  hand,  men  who  do  not  inherit, 
but  by  active  ability  earn,  prominent  po- 
sitions, are  apt  to  be  coarse  and  greedy ;  and 
so,  the  highest  gentleman  is  by  no  means  al- 
ways found  in  the  highest  place.  Eminences, 
civil  and  ecclesiastical,  and  even  military,  are 
too  often  the  prizes  of  much  more  self-seeking 
and  stirring  worldliness  than  are  consistent 
with  the  best  type  of  gentlemanhood.  Bayard 
was  to  the  end  of  his  long  career  a  subordi- 
nate,— he  who  ought  to  have  been  a  generalis- 
simo at  thirty,  and  would,  had  he  been  more 
selfish  (but  then  he  had  not  been  Bayard),  and 
less  modest ;  for  a  great  power  in  the  world, 
but  one  incompatible  with  the  purest  gentle- 
manliness,  is  impudence,  which  is  a  compound 
of  equal  parts  of  self-confidence  and  unscru- 
pulousness.  —  Sidney,  although  young  when  he 


NAPOLEON.  49 

fell  at  Zutphen,  was  better  fitted  for  command 
than  he  under  whom  he  served,  his  uncle,  the 
unprincipled  worldling,  Leicester,  who,  with  all 
his  birth  and  rank  and  magnificence,  was  as 
far  from  high  gentlemanhood  as  the  most  ab- 
ject of  his  valets.  —  Hampden  was  a  man  and 
a  gentleman  of  the  largest  and  finest  mould, 
humane  and  intrepid,  wise  and  refined,  always 
kindly,  always  resolute,  with  a  broad,  far- 
seeing  intellect  at  the  command  of  feelings  as 
warm  as  they  were  pure,  as  tempered  as  they 
were  strong,  —  a  man  full  of  dutifulness  and 
heroism,  with  "  a  flowing  courtesy  to  all 
men." — A  supreme  gentleman  was  "Wash- 
ington, raised  to  the  front  of  the  world  by 
the  grand  necessities  of  a  sublime  historical 
epoch.  —  Napoleon  was  a  sublime  snob. 

Napoleon's  mind  was  swollen  with  the  virus 
of  vulgar  ambition.  His  moral  nature,  origi- 
nally cold  and  meagre,  grew  blotched  as  he 
advanced,  festering  with  the  lust  of  power  and 
its  subservient  crimes.  His  love  was  ever  self- 
love.  He  circled  himself  with  dependants, 

not  with  friends.     Dutifulness  was  unknown  to 
4 


50  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

him ;  generosity  he  scorned ;  tenderness  he 
pitied.  Bloated  by  the  perpetual  conscious- 
ness of  his  astounding  exaltation,  he  had  an 
enjoyment,  that  was  at  once  gross  and  puerile, 
in  the  wielding  of  his  super-regal  sceptre.  He 
had  not  in  him  purity  enough  to  value  truth- 
fulness and  delicacy  in  others ;  and,  never 
letting  the  rights  or  feelings  of  a  fellow-man 
stand  in  the  way  of  his  desires,  he  was  at 
tunes  as  brutal  in  his  bearing  as  he  was  sel- 
fish in  his  aims.  In  the  treatment  of  women 
he  was  unmannerly  and  unmanly.  He  made 
his  mother  stand  in  his  presence  !  It  was  not 
the  Caesarian  conqueror,  it  was  the  Imperial 
parvenu  that  kept  kings  waiting  in  his  ante- 
chamber ;  a  gentleman  had  been  eager  that 
their  strange  subordination  were  as  little  felt 
as  might  be.  The  man  was  maddened :  he 
was  possessed  with  a  mania,  a  vast  insatiable 
greed  of  dominion,  that  subdued  him  to  a 
demon-darkness,  and  pulled  the  Emperor  from 
his  throne,  the  gentleman  from  his  beauty  and 
his  propriety.  —  Louis  Napoleon,  —  in  intellect 
immeasurably  inferior  to  his  uncle,  —  is  as  ma- 


ST.  PAUL.  51 

terial  in  his  nature  and  as  mole-eyed  as  he  to 
the  true  grandeurs  of  Imperial  rule  ;  but  he  is 
capable  of  generosity,  and  is  at  least  a  gentle- 
man in  outward  deportment. 

Napoleon,  enwrapt  in  self-exhaled  gloom, 
illustrates  the  suspension  of  moral  freedom, 
the  obscuration  of  the  illuminating  spiritual 
forces  before  pride,  flanked  by  the  blinding 
material  forces.  St.  Paul  illustrates  the  maj- 
esty of  moral  freedom,  the  potency  of  an  in-  _ 
ward  might,  with  life  enough  in  it  to  appease 
the  animal  insurgents,  to  calm  the  mutinous 
me,  and  subject  the  whole  being  to  the  domin- 
ion of  feelings  that,  too  high  for  malice,  too 
clean  for  personalities,  know  nor  self-seeking 
nor  petty  limitations.  Within  the  core  of  Saul 
of  Tarsus,  the  prized  pupil  of  Gamaliel,  "  a 
blasphemer  and  persecutor  and  injurious,"  lay 
latent,  gigantic  moral  energies ;  else  had  he 
not  been  chosen  to  be  assailed  by  that  sun-sur- 
passing glare  on  the  road  to  Damascus.  After 
beholding  that  vision,  after  listening  to  that 
voice,  he  soared  at  a  flight  into  the  serene  of 
almost  transterrestrial  mastership,  whereby  he 


52  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

was  enabled  to  trample  under  foot  all  the  pride 
and  the  rancor  and  the  lusts  and  the  narrow- 
ness of  the  Jew,  Saul.  Thenceforward  the 
staple  of  his  earthly  life  was  a  superiority  to 
earthly  pains  and  pleasures.  He  moved  with 
the  springiness  of  one  who  has  just  alighted 
from  upper  spheres,  and  thrids  our  grovelling 
crowds  with  a  winged  buoyancy.  In  Paul's 
nature  there  was  rare  breadth  as  well  as  vigor. 
In  all  circumstances  he  felt  that  easy  com- 
manding self-possession  which,  in  the  ordinary 
conduct  of  life,  is  a  characteristic  of  the  gen- 
tleman. He  was  always  equal  to  or  above  the 
situation.  One  of  his  highest  qualifications 
for  his  great  mission  was  his  belief  in  an  in- 
born human  capacity  for  goodness  and  eleva- 
tion, a  belief  drawn  from  the  depths  of  his 
own  consciousness.  The  lofty,  spiritually- 
minded  Frederick  W.  Robertson,  —  to  whom 
clings  so  gracefully  the  too  often  unfitting  title 
of  Reverend, — in  one  of  those  teemful,  lucent 
passages  that  throng  his  pages  as  stars  the 
transparent  heaven,  says  of  St.  Paul: — "And 
here  you  observe,  as  usual,  that  the  Apostle 


ST.  PAUL.  53 

returns  again  to  the  great  Idea  of  the  Church 
of  God,  the  invisible  Church,  Humanity,  as  it 
exists  in  the  Divine  Mind.  This  is  the  stand- 
ard he  ever  puts  before  them.  He  says,  This 
you  are.  If  you  fall  from  this,  you  contradict 
your  nature.  And  now  consider  how  opposite 
this,  St.  Paul's  way,  is  to  the  common  way  of 
insisting  on  man's  depravity.  He  insists  on 
man's  dignity :  he  does  not  say  to  a  man, '  You 
are  fallen,  you  cannot  think  a  good  thought ;  you 
are  half  beast,  half  devil ;  sin  is  alone  to  be 
expected  of  you;  it  is  your  nature  to  sin.' 
But  he  says  rather,  '  It  is  your  nature  not  to 
sin ;  you  are  not  the  Child  of  the  Devil,  but 
the  Child  of  God.'  " 

Such  faith  in  human  nobleness  yields  bloom- 
ing fruit  in  daily  manners,  imparting  to  the 
carriage  of  a  man  towards  his  fellow-men, 
even  in  moments  of  reproof,  respectfulness  and 
gentleness,  qualities  so  eminently  exhibited  by 
St.  Paul.  To  this  faith,  —  rooted  in  intense 
fellow-feeling  for  his  brother  men,  and  thriving 
on  the  richness  of  his  moral  nature,  —  was  in 
him  inseparably  united  —  as  the  blue  to  the 


54  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

red  in  the  rainbow  —  a  deep,  unwearied  sen- 
sibility to  the  beautiful  in  life,  a  sympathy  with 
the  graceful  in  word  and  deed,  a  joyful  recog- 
nition of  the  livelier  presence  of  the  divine  in 
all  excellence  ;  by  which  recognition  and  sym- 
pathy his  own  deeds  were  inspirited,  to  which 
his  words  owed  much  of  their  marrow  and 
ringing  emphasis,  and  without  which  his  zeal 
had  been  maimed,  and  his  eloquence  shorn  of 
its  golden  cadence,  and  we  had  not  had  the 
pithiness  empowered  by  chasteness,  the  suc- 
cinct, elastic  beauty  we  now  have  in  the 
speeches  before  Agrippa  and  the  Athenians ; 
nor  had  the  fourteenth  chapter  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Romans,  and  the  thirteenth  of  the  first 
Corinthians,  been  the  glowing  models  of  wis- 
dom and  terseness,  the  ever-fresh  inexhaust- 
ible lessons  that  they  are  ;  nor,  in  short,  had 
he  himself  dilated  to  that  large,  symmetrical, 
impressive  grandeur  that  makes  him  St.  Paul. 
In  the  fourth  chapter  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians  are  two  verses,  the  twenty-fifth  and 
thirty-second,  which,  sympathetically  accepted 
and  cordially  put  into  action,  would  make  him 


ST.  PAUL.  55 

who  should  so  accept  and  act  them  a  gentle- 
man, beside  whom  many  who  claim  the  title 
were  tarnished  gilt  or  shabby  pinchbeck: 
"  Speak  every  man  truth  with  his  neighbor : 
for  we  are  members  one  of  another."  "And 
be  ye  kind  to  one  another,  tender-hearted, 
forgiving  one  another."  In  his  practice,  St. 
Paul  was  as  thorough  and  exemplary  as  in 
his  speech.  When  he  was  brought  before  the 
Council  of  the  Jews  at  Jerusalem,  the  High 
Priest,  Ananias,  commanded  those  that  stood 
by  Paul  to  smite  him  on  the  mouth.  "  God 
shall  smite  thee,  thou  whited  wall :  for  sittest 
thou  to  judge  me  after  the  law,  and  command- 
est  me  to  be  smitten  contrary  to  the  law  ?  " 
Here  is  the  outflashing  of  a  violated  spirit 
against  what  was  at  once  an  injustice  and  a 
personal  affront,  —  the  sudden  wrath  of  a  sus- 
ceptible gentleman,  courageously  asserting  his 
rights  and  his  dignity.  But  see  the  other,  more 
unusual,  and  the  more  difficult  side  of  gentle- 
manliness  ;  for  high-spirited  gentlemen  are  apt 
to  be  quicker  to  straighten  themselves  angrily 
against  an  assault  than  to  bend  for  the  due 


56  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

apology.  But  St.  Paul  -was  as  prompt  to  re- 
dress an  offence  committed  by  his  own  heat,  as 
to  repel  an  attack.  "  And  they  that  stood  by, 
said,  Revilest  thou  God's  High  Priest  ?  Then 
said  St.  Paul,  I  wist  not,  brethren,  that  he  was 
the  High  Priest :  for  it  is  written,  thou  shalt 
not  speak  evil  of  the  ruler  of  thy  people." 

In  that  trenchant  chapter  "  of  meats  offered 
to  Idols,"  the  eighth  of  first  Corinthians,  after 
explaining  that  idols  not  being  gods,  the  meats 
offered  to  them  are  not  thereby  defiled,  and 
therefore,  "  neither  if  we  eat  are  we.  the  bet- 
ter; neither  if  we  eat  not,  are  we  the  worse ; " 
nevertheless,  take  heed,  he  adds,  lest  this  lib- 
erty which  you  have  to  eat  or  not  to  eat  be- 
come a  stumbling-block  to  the  weak  ;  for  they, 
not  having  strength  of  mind  and  knowledge  to 
see  the  matter  as  it  is,  may  sin  against  their 
conscience  in  eating  this  meat ;  and  he  ends 
the  short  chapter  with  the  following  verse,  re- 
splendent with  moral  beauty,  and  embodying 
much  of  the  very  essence  of  Christian  gen- 
tlemanhood :  "  Wherefore,  if  meat  make  my 
brother  to  offend,  I  will  eat  no  flesh  while  the 


ST.  PAUL.  57 

world  standeth,  lest  I  make  my  brother  to  of- 
fend." 

One  more  illustrative  passage  I  must  cite 
from  St.  Paul,  the  conclusion  of  his  speech 
before  Agrippa.  "  Then  Agrippa  said  unto 
Paul,  Almost  thou  persuadest  me  to  be  a 
Christian.  And  Paul  said,  I  would  to  God, 
that  not  only  thou,  but  also  all  that  hear  me 
this  day,  were  both  almost  and  altogether  such 
as  I  am."  Here  was  a  fitting  close  to  the 
most  beautiful,  the  most  memorable  speech  on 
record.  To  all  orators  of  whom  we  know,  it  had 
here  been  finished,  and  well  finished ;  not  so  to 
St.  Paul.  To  him  three  words  were  yet  want- 
ing to  it,  words  which  could  only  have  been 
spoken  by  the  tongue  of  one,  a  gentleman  of 
ripest  sensibility,  of  the  most  tender  regardful- 
ness  towards  others,  and  of  a  high-bred  grace, 
the  like  of  which  the  king  had  surely  hi  his 
many  audiences  not  witnessed  before.  Figure 
his  great  countenance,  aglow  with  the  sublime 
fulness  of  the  occasion,  as  slightly  bending 
forward  and  lifting  up  his  manacled  hands, 
he  adds,  —  "  except  these  bonds."  This  ex- 


58  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

temporaneous  utterance  of  exquisite  yet  sim- 
ple feeling,  of  subtlest  consideration  for  his 
hearers,  an  instantaneous  feeling-full  thought- 
fulness,  as  far  exceeds  all  famous  strokes  of 
oratory  as  the  play  of  lightning  does  a  pyro- 
technic ostentation. 

Two  titles  there  are,  \vhich,  as  the  duplicate 
elaborate  crowns  of  culture  and  of  conduct, 
can  neither  be  earned  lightly  nor  arbitrarily 
bestowed,  and  must  from  their  very  peerless- 
ness  be  worn  modestly,  —  titles,  to  which  be- 
long a  costlier  import,  a  more  gleaming  brill- 
iancy, that  they  were  won  by  St.  Paul.  They 
who  are  so  choicely  entitled  will  wear  them 
with  proud  humility,  when  they  think,  that  by 
his  nature  and  his  discipline,  by  his  aspira- 
tions and  his  knowledge,  by  his  humanity  and 
his  refinement,  the  great  Apostle  of  the  Gen- 
tiles was  preeminently  a  Scholar  and  a  Gen- 
tleman. 


V. 


THE  ANCIENTS  —  CHRISTIAN  INFLUENCE  —  ROMAS  SENATE  —  THS 
DUEL —  BANQUET  OF  PLATO  —  POSITION  OF  WOMEN  AMONG  THB 
ANCIENTS. 

TTTERE  the  Gentile  contemporaries  and  pre- 
decessors of  St.  Paul,  the  high  men 
among  the  Greeks  and  the  Romans,  the  men 
from  whose  words  and  deeds  we  remote  mod- 
erns have  not  yet  done  learning,  who  were  the 
salt  of  the  Pagan  earth,  and  whose  saltness  has 
not  yet  lost  all  its  savor,  —  were  the  Brutuses 
and  Caesar  and  Cicero  and  the  Scipios  and 
Sylla  and  the  Catos  and  Pompey  and  Paulus 
JEmilius,  —  were  Pericles  and  Epaminondas 
and  Miltiades  and  Plato  and  Dion  and  Timo- 
leon  and  Socrates  and  Xenophon  and  Phocion 
and  Alcibiades.  —  men  whose  greatness  still 
feeds  our  thought,  —  were  they  gentlemen  ? 
It  is  a  fine  question,  the  brief  consideration  of 
which  will  bring  us  still  further  into  the  depths 
of  our  theme. 


60  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

Historically  we  find  man  elevated  and  en- 
larged under  Christianity.  He  has  become 
gradually  imbued  with  certain  great  prolific 
ideas  and  sentiments :  the  Oneness  and  Pa 
ternity  of  God ;  the  innateness  of  high,  un- 
selfish feelings,  with  a  presentiment  of  their 
destined  predominance  in  humanity;  the  sen- 
timent of  universal  brotherhood ;  the  exalta- 
tion of  womanhood  ;  the  spirituality  of  man  as 
an  eternally  living  soul; — ideas  and  sentiments 
not  only  not  prevalent  among  the  Greeks  and 
Romans,  but  not  all  of  them  apprehended  by 
their  highest  minds,  by  Socrates  and  Plato,  by 
Cicero  *  and  Aurelius.  Especially  is  belief  in 
the  spirituality  and  immortality  of  man  incal- 
culably ennobling.  So  grand,  indeed,  is  the 
conception  of  an  endless,  ever-brightening  life, 
that  no  earthly  mind  has  the  grasp  and  inno- 
cence to  compass  it  in  its  entireness.  Could 
any  one  attain  to  an  absolute,  perpetual  reali- 

*  What  a  grand  spiritual  flash  shot  through  the  brain  of 
Cicero,  when  he  had  such  a  sublime  insight  as  to  write,  — 
"Your  father,  Paulus,  and  others  whom  we  speak  of  as 
dead,  are  still  alive,  while  our  present  life,  as  compared  to 
theirs,  is  death." 


CHRISTIAN  INFLUENCE.  61 

zation  of  his  own  personal  everlastingness,  he 
would  be  as  surely  purged  of  all  stain  as  a 
body  that  floated  on  the  confines  of  the  Sun's 
periphery  would  be  of  darkness.  What  the 
difference  is  between  intellectual  impression,  or 
even  conviction,  and  the  practical  verification, 
the  daily  incarnation,  of  a  great  idea  like  this, 
we  may  form  some  notion,  by  contrasting  with 
a  warm,  working  Pauline  faith,  the  traditional, 
conventional  Sunday  Christianity  of  the  lis- 
teners in  the  highestrpriced  pews  in  any  of 
the  churches  of — New  York  or  Philadelphia. 
More  by  imperceptible  diffusion  and  infiltra- 
tion, by  slow  almost  unconscious  permeation, 
than  by  intensity  of  action,  have  these  generic 
feelings  and  principles,  especially  that  of  im- 
mortality, wrought  upon  the  modern  mind ; 
and  a  primary  effect  of  them  being  a  recog- 
nition of  man  as  man  (above  his  mere  citizen- 
ship or  productive  utility),  and  a  consequent 
respect  for  and  sympathy  with  mere  manhocd, 
they  have  gradually  modified  human  inter- 
course and  manners.  It  would  be  too  much 
to  say,  that  among  the  Greeks  and  the  Ho- 


62  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

mans  there  were  no  gentlemen,  —  although 
perhaps,  bating  a  few  very  exceptional  indi- 
viduals, even  that  position  might  be  main- 
tained,—  but  we  are  justified  in  affirming  that 
the  personal  association  even  of  their  highest 
was  not  controlled  by  what  at  this  day  per- 
vades in  some  degree  all  Christendom,  namely, 
the  gentlemanly,  —  a  calmness  and  sweetness 
of  spirit,  fostered  by  independent  manliness 
and  the  dignity  of  self-respect,  made  pliable 
and  gracious  by  respect  for  others,  —  a  gen- 
tle considerate  bearing  on  all  sides,  that,  giving 
security  and  tranquillity  to  each  one,  generates 
an  atmosphere  which,  though  breathed  in  its 
purest  condition  only  by  those  who  are  fa- 
vored both  by  education  and  temperament, 
tints  the  valleys  and  plains,  as  well  as  the 
heights  of  the  social  world  with  its  delicate 
hue,  and  gives  to  the  intercourse  of  Christen- 
dom a  tone  of  more  or  less  kindliness. 

In  support  of  the  position  as  to  the  absence 
of  gentlemanly  tone  among  the  Ancients,  I 
will  cite  two  examples,  taken  from  the  very 
top  of  Pagan  society.  The  first  is  a  scene  in 


ROMAN  SENATE.  63 

the  Roman  Senate,  thus  related  by  Plutarch: — 
"  While  Cato  was  warmly  contesting  his  point 
with  Csesar,  and  the  eyes  of  the  whole  Senate 
were  upon  the  disputants,  it  is  said  that  a  bil- 
let was  brought  in  and  delivered  to  Caesar. 
Cato  immediately  suspected  him  of  some 
traitorous  design;  and  it  was  moved  in  the 
Senate  that  the  billet  should  be  read  aloud. 
Caesar  delivered  it  to  Cato,  who  stood  near 
him ;  and  the  latter  had  no  sooner  cast  his 
eye  upon  it,  than  he  perceived  it  to  be  in  the 
handwriting  of  his  own  sister,  Servilia,  who 
was  passionately  in  love  with  Caesar,  and  by 
him  had  been  seduced.  He  therefore  threw 
it  back  to  Caesar,  saying,  '  Take  it,  you  sot, 
and  went  on  with  his  discourse." 

Now,  scenes  of  rudeness  to  match  this  — 
though  not  exactly  of  the  same  character  — 
occur  hi  Parliaments,  Congresses,  Cortezes, 
Chambers  ;  but  they  pass  not  unnoticed. 
Within  the  walls  where  gather  these  assem- 
blages, reigns  a  paramount  law  of  decency 
and  propriety,  the  violator  of  which  is  called 
to  order,  is  obliged  to  apologize  to  the  House, 


64  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

and  also  to  the  object  of  his  grossness,  or  suf- 
fer a  loss  of  general  esteem,  besides  having 
possibly  to  answer  with  his  life  for  his  lan- 
guage. But  the  Roman  Senate  did  not  feel 
its  dignity  offended  by  the  scene  ;  nor  had 
Caesar  any  thought  of  calling  Cato  to  per- 
sonal account  for  such  coarse,  insulting  words ; 
nor  did  it  enter  into  the  mind  of  any  witness 
that,  on  the  adjournment  of  the  Senate,  Csesar 
would  despatch  his  young  friend  Anthony  with 
a  brief  note,  which  Cato  would  answer  through 
his  friend  Hortensius,  (the  same  to  whom  Cato 
obligingly  lent  his  wife,)  and  that  the  following 
dawn  would  find  the  four,  with  attendant  sur- 
geons, issuing  mysteriously  out  of  the  Cape- 
nian  gate  to  interchange  cuts  and  thrusts, 
(mankind  had  not  yet  the  benefit  of  pistols,) 
possibly  under  cover  of  the  Egerian  grove. 
Had  such  a  proceeding  been  foreshadowed  on 
the  brain  of  Csesar,  it  would  doubtless  —  al- 
though he  of  course  was  "  as  brave  as  Julius 
Csesar" — have  modified  his  action;  so  that, 
instead  of  indelicately  thrusting  such  a  billet, 
in  open  Senate,  under  Cato's  nose,  he  would 


THE  DUEL.  65 

have  privately  shown  it  to  a  friend  of  Cato, 
who  would  then  have  whispered  in  the  latter's 
ear,  —  "  Nothing  to  do  with  public  affairs :  of 
a  very  private  nature  ; "  and  so  the  matter 
had  ended.  And  this,  the  gentlemanly  course, 
Caesar  would  have  pursued,  not  for  the  direct 
purpose  of  avoiding  a  duel,  but  cordially  to 
conform  to  the  requirements  made  by  personal 
susceptibility  and  the  reciprocal  demand  of  re- 
spectfulness,— feelings',  the  existence  of  which 
would  have  been  proved  by  the  very  fact  of 
their  being  guarded  by  a  penalty  so  mortal 
and  semi-judicial.  But  owing  to  the  causes 
just  now  adverted  to,  and  which  are  closely 
connected  with  the  fact,  that  in  ancient 
Paganism,  the  State  was  all  in  all,  the  indi- 
vidual citizen  nothing,  —  Man  being,  as  it 
were,  first  consecrated  by  Christianity, — 
there  scarcely  existed,  even  in  the  highest 
class,  the  sense  of  individual  sanctity,  with  its 
bloody  symbol,  the  Duel. 

The  duel  has  undoubtedly  had,  in  ruder 
times,  a  salutary  influence  on  manners,  albeit 
its  growing  infrequency  in  the  most  cultivated 

5 


66  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

portions  of  Christendom  proves  that  in  the 
more  advanced  stages  of  social  development  it 
is  not  essential  to  the  protection  of  those  per- 
sonal rights  and  sensibilities  that  are  un- 
guarded by  the  law.  In  acknowledgment  of 
its  social  services  it  has  been  called  the  cheap- 
est and  most  effective  police-measure  ever  con- 
trived, protecting,  by  the  occasional  sacrifice 
of  life,  thousands,  especially  women  and  the 
physically  weak,  against  outrages  of  word  or 
act,  and  insults  from  the  brutal  and  overbear- 
ing. Its  institution  was  a  token  and  a  fruit 
of  a  lively  sense  of  personal  honor,  of  a  laud- 
able jealousy, — however  at  tunes  exaggerated, 
— of  individual  dignity,  of  a  manly  readiness  to 
hold  inviolate,  at  peril  even  of  life,  the  sacred- 
ness  of  private  sensibilities.  In  battles  and  in 
brawls,  the  Greeks  and  the  Romans  were  no 
less  brave  than  we  moderns,  and  surely  they 
were  not  more  moral  or  tender,  or  regardful 
of  life ;  and  that  in  their  higher  classes  they 
had  not  introduced  the  duel,  is  evidence  of  the 
absence  of  that  susceptibility  to  personal  out- 
rage, of  that  sense  of  fine  responsibility  which 


THE  DUEL.  67 

characterize  gentlemen  throughout  Christen- 
dom, and  to  secure  which  they  have  found 
deadly  weapons  the  best  shield,  which  weapons 
are  only  now  getting  into  disuse,  their  efficien- 
cy being  merged  in  the  fuller  growth  of  in- 
ward refinement  and  outward  courtesy,  to 
which  the  consciousness  of  personal  account- 
ability has  no  doubt  contributed. 

The  sanctity  of  the  individual,  the  inviolable- 
ness  of  one's  personality,  lies  at  the  basis  of 
the  modern  duel,  which  in  its  essence  means, 
—  whoever  invades  these  does  so  at  the  risk 
of  his  life.  As  Christian  civilization  advances, 
this  sanctity  gets  to  be  so  recognized,  that,  to 
guard  it,  such  liability  is  no  longer  needed. 
Infringement  is  so  visited  with  general  repro- 
bation, that  the  violator  is  rebuked  as  by  a 
universal  hiss,  which,  freighting  the  violation 
with  consequences  even  more  formidable  than 
under  the  grosser  penalty,  checks  the  impulse 
to  violation,  while  at  the  same  time,  through 
the  elevating  influence  of  moral  culture,  there 
takes  place  a  solution  of  the  duelling  point  of 
honor  hi  the  predominance  of  general  recipro- 


68  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

cal  respect  and  reverence,  personal  sensitive- 
ness being  modulated  by  a  freer,  purer  atmos- 
phere, enfolding  social  intercourse  in  the  trans- 
parent mail  of  cordial  good-breeding. 

In  the  celebrated  Banquet  of  Plato  will 
be  found  another  exemplification  of  the  want 
of  gentlemanly  delicacy  among  the  Ancients. 
The  evidence  furnished  by  parts  of  the  speech- 
es of  the  guests,  especially  that  of  Alcibiades, 
is  not  less  cogent,  if  the  scene,  instead  of  be- 
ing the  description  of  a  supper  that  actually 
took  place  at  the  house  of  Agathon,  be  an  in- 
vention of  Plato,  to  set  off  one  of  his  elabo- 
rate discussions ;  for  in  the  latter  case  he  would 
have  adhered,  even  unconsciously,  to  the  veri- 
similitudes of  the  occasion,  and  his  recital, 
though  otherwise  fanciful,  would  be  a  picture 
of  the  sentiment  and  manners  of  the  inter- 
locutors. It  is  true,  Alcibiades,  on  arriving 
late,  declares  himself  already  drunk ;  but  he 
not  only  makes  a  clear  continuous  speech,  but 
at  the  end  of  it  Socrates  says,  — "  You  seem 
to  me,  Alcibiades,  to  be  sober."  Indeed, 
what  the  Greeks  called  drunk,  (Shelley  in  his 


WOMEN  AMONG  THE  ANCIENTS.      69 

translation  has  it  "  excessively  drunk,")  must 
have  been  very  different  from  the  mental  de- 
thronement we  thus  designate,  if  one  in  that 
state  could  speak  so  intelligently  and  consecu- 
tively as  Alcibiades  in  this  long  discourse. 

Most  significant,  well-nigh  decisive,  as  to 
the  non-existence  of  the  gentlemanly  among  the 
Ancients,  was  the  position  of  women.  Upon 
constant,  daily,  life-long,  female  social  interven- 
tion and  participation,  freely  accepted  and  en- 
joyed, depends  the  culture  of  the  finer  sensi- 
bilities. To  the  formation  of  gentlemanly  and 
lady-like  habits  of  feeling,  thinking,  and  de- 
meanor, a  free,  frequent,  trustful  interchange 
of  services  and  sentiments,  a  steady  interplay 
of  powers  between  the  sexes  is  indispensable. 
The  Ancients  seem  hardly  to  have  had  moth- 
'ers  and  sisters  and  wives  and  daughters,  so 
completely  are  these  kept  in  the  background, 
so  unparticipant  in  Greek  and  Eoman  con- 
verse. There  was  little  of  that  mental  inter- 
marriage between  the  sexes,  which  is  so  pro- 
found and  beneficent  an  element  of  Christian 
society,  —  a  union  fruitful  of  proprieties  and 


70  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

refinements,  of  purities  and  elegancies.  Among 
the  Ancients  the  two  sexes  lived  almost  in  bar- 
ren, mental  isolation.  Their  men  were  never 
inspired  or  encouraged  by  the  thought  of  wom- 
an's approval.  Very  slight  are  the  traces  of 
female  influence  upon  conduct.  Of  no  young 
Grecian  or  Roman  warrior  would  it  have  been 
sung  as  of  Chaucer's  Squire,  — 

"  And  borne  him  wel,  as  of  so  litel  space, 
In  hope  to  stonden  in  his  ladies  grace." 


VI. 


C«SAB  —  BRUTUS  —  SOCRATES  —  GRECIAN  MYTHOLOGY  —  HOMERIC 
HEROES  —  IDEALS. 


the  foremost  man  of  all  the  Ro- 
mans,  compels  the  admiration  of  the  world 
by  his  easy  superiority,  by  the  dazzling  brill- 
iancy of  his  practical  genius,  by  his  magna- 
nimity and  by  the  grandeur  of  his  bearing  ; 
but  he  was  withal  a  lofty  worldling,  a  criminal 
self-seeker.  And  therefore,  notwithstanding 
the  splendor  of  his  intellectual  nature,  —  not 
having  the  spiritual  buoyancy  to  rise  above 
the  moral  level  of  his  time,  —  he  does  not  shine 
a  premature  impersonation  of  gentlemanhood. 
This  distinction  belongs,  among  the  Romans, 
to  Brutus. 

However  short  -sighted,  politically,  Brutus 
may  have  shown  himself  in  slaying  Caesar, 
neither  that  nor  any  other  act  of  his  life  was 
prompted  by  ambition.  Had  he  been  a  world- 
ly climber,  a  selfish  calculator,  he  might  prob- 


72  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

ably —  through  Caesar's  partiality  for  him  — 
have  shared  and  succeeded  to  Caesar's  power. 
But,  as  was  said  by  the  contemporary  Romans, 
while  Cassius  hated  the  Emperor,  the  Imperial 
sway  it  was  that  Brutus  hated.  When  ap- 
pointed by  Caesar  Governor  of  Cisalpine  Gaul, 
for  himself  by  his  administration  he  won  es- 
teem and  love,  and  popularity  for  Caesar ;  for 
he  was  just,  self-denying,  humane,  in  shame- 
less, ravenous  times,  when  it  was  the  custom 
of  governors  to  be  tyrannical  and  rapacious. 
A  man  of  lofty  but  pure  aspirations,  and  wide 
sympathies,  all  men  trusted  Brutus.  Of  a  re- 
fined, impressible  nature,  he  was  not  organized 
for  the  tumults,  the  coarse  conflicts  of  public 
life,  into  which  he  was  drawn  by  his  patriotic 
spirit,  by  zeal  for  the  general  good,  and  by  an 
innate,  active  love  of  justice. 

In  the  character  of  Brutus  as  drawn  by 
Shakspeare,  there  is  such  warmth  of  coloring, 
such  fulness  and  finish,  that  I  have  pleased 
myself  with  thinking  that  in  it  there  is  discern- 
ible —  what  there  is  not  in  any  other  of  his 
vivid  delineations  —  a  personal  partiality,  an 


SOCRATES.  73 

individual  fondness,  as  though  he  had  wrought 
at  the  portrait  of  Brutus  with  something  more 
than  the  broad  artistic  love  of  the  creative 
Master. 

A  crowning  confirmation  of  the  claim  put 
forward  for  Brutus,  is  his  relation  to  Portia, 
which,  in  its  confidential  equality  and  men- 
tal intimacy,  approaches  much  nearer  to  our 
modern  conjugal  relation  than  was  customary 
among  the  Romans.  And  in  confirmation  of 
the  importance  claimed  for  female  influence  in 
the  moulding  of  gentlemen,  the  first  fact  I 
cite  in  regard  to  Socrates,  —  who,  living  four 
centuries  before  our  era,  was  nevertheless  an 
indefeasible  Christian  gentleman,  —  is,  that 
this  transcendent  Greek  sought  the  society 
of  women  of  talent,  avowedly  for  the  culture 
of  his  head  and  heart. 

Equally  on  the  battle-field,  at  the  banquet, 
in  talk  on  the  market-place,  in  philosophic  dis- 
quisition, in  political  discussion,  Socrates  was 
the  easy  master  of  the  situation  and  the  com- 
pany. Always  calm,  apparently  indifferent, 
while  doing  or  saying  better  things  than  any 


74  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

other,  he  seems  hardly  to  have  been  liable 
to  anger  or  passionate  outbreak,  as  though  his 
nature  were  of  a  superhuman  inexcitability,  of 
a  godlike  breadth  and  equipoise.  In  his  bear- 
ing there  "was  a  sublime  nonchalance,  in  his 
mind  a  majestic  suppleness.  The  movement  of 
his  logic  was  that  of  a  resistless  mechanism, 
supplied  from  inexhaustible,  inward  fountains. 
His  great  intellect  worked  with  as  little  effort 
as  a  water-fall.  He  suggests  so  much,  that 
•we  think  of  him  as  of  one  who  quitted  the 
earth  without  giving  forth  the  half  that  was  in 
him.  After  teaching  all  the  highest  men  of 
his  day,  and  impregnating  the  mighty  brain 
of  Plato,  his  mind  gave  signs  of  a  vast  fund 
of  unused  power,  as  though  fleshly  ears  were 
not  deep  enough  for  his  wisdom,  and  he  had 
to  pass  through  the  capacious  portal  of  death 
into  wider,  wealthier  spheres,  to  find  companies 
that  should  be  fit  recipients  of  the  whole  beau- 
ty and  affluence  of  his  soul. 

Towards  the  end  of  his  last  day  on  earth, 
described  in  the  Phcedo, — that  immortal  trea- 
tise on  immortality,  that  circumstantial  report, 


SOCRATES.  75 

invaluable  to  mankind,  of  the  final  words  and 
doings  of  this  -wonderful  Athenian,  —  perceiv- 
ing that  the  Sun  being  near  its  setting,  the 
hour  was  almost  come  for  him  to  drink  the 
hemlock,  he  concluded  a  description  of  the 
various  judgments  awaiting  men  in  the  next 
world,  with  these  words :  "  You  then,  Simias 
and  Cebes  and  the  rest,  will  each  of  you  de- 
part at  some  future  time;  but  now  destiny 
summons  me,  as  a  tragic  writer  would  say, 
and  it  is  nearly  time  for  me  to  betake  myself 
to  the  bath ;  for  it  appears  to  me  to  be  better 
to  drink  the  poison  after  I  have  bathed  myself, 
and  not  to  trouble  the  women  with  washing  my 
dead  body"  That  which  is  of  the  inmost  es- 
sence of  gentlemanhood,  kindly,  anticipative 
thoughtfulness  for  others,  is  here,  —  consider- 
ing the  occasion  and  the  moment,  —  carried 
to  the  height  of  the  sublime.  And  although 
Socrates  says,  that  he  would  bathe  in  order 
that  the  women  —  as  was  the  Grecian  cus- 
tom —  should  not  have  the  trouble  of  washing 
his  dead  body,  there  doubtless  mingled  with 
that  beautiful  feeling  another  element,  still  re- 


76  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

fining  its  beauty,  namely,  a  virgin-like  mod- 
esty, an  incomparable  manly  delicacy.  In  this 
little  act,  which  stamps  Socrates  a  rare,  chival- 
rous gentleman,  there  is  a  depth  of  moral  ten- 
derness that  would  have  added  another  circle 
even  to  the  multiplex  crown  that  glistens  above 
the  head  of  Paul. 

Saving  the  awful  martyrdom  of  that  youth- 
ful divine  life  on  Calvary,  human  annals  have 
nothing  grander  than  the  death  of  Socrates, 
who  in  the  spirituality  of  his  nature  stands 
supreme  and  alone  among  the  great  Greeks. 

The  poetic  creations  of  a  People  being  a 
reflex  of  its  character  and  its  aspirations,  Ho- 
mer and  the  Grecian  mythology  are  quick 
with  the  predominant  qualities  of  the  Greek 
mind.  The  gods  of  Greece,  even  more  than 
the  Iliad  and  Odyssey  and  the  tragic  Drama, 
are  the  poetic  outcome,  so  to  speak,  of  Greek 
nature.  A  marvellous  company  they  are, 
those  gods,  —  the  resplendent  attestors  of  the 
generative  potency  there  was  in  the  Greek 
mind  that  it  could  beget  them.  From  their 
plastic  beauty,  their  gladsome  naturalness, 


GRECIAN  MYTHOLOGY.  77 

their  infinitely  discriminated  diversity,  they 
challenge  the  admiration  of  cultivated  Chris- 
tendom. But  nowhere  among  them  do  we 
perceive  a  Christian  spirituality  like  that  of 
Socrates.  They  are  ah1  of  the  earth,  in  their 
beauty  earthy,  and  their  desires.  They  come 
down  to  the  earth  not  merely  to  take  part  in 
its  conflicts,  —  which  might  be  and  was  the 
mark  of  celestial  sympathy  with  terrestrial 
troubles,  —  but  also  to  taste  directly  of  its 
sensual  joys.  And  they  have  not  far  to  come ; 
for  the  top  of  Olympus  was  less  than  eight 
thousand  feet  above  the  level  of  the  earth. 
Sensuous  they  all  are,  shaken  by  mundane 
passion,  conditioned  by  the  circumscriptions  of 
the  semi-animal  self.  They  have  not  their  be- 
ing, like  the  Christian  angels,  and  even  the 
Hindoo  deities,  in  a  plane  spiritually  elevated 
and  boundless.  It  may  sound  like  a  profane 
libel  on  the  renowned  Olympians,  but  there 
was  not  a  gentleman  among  them.  Jupiter, 
their  chief,  beat  his  wife  ;  so  his  claim  is  bar- 
red at  once,  without  looking  further  into  his 
way  of  life,  which  will  not  bear  looking  into. 


78  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

Apollo,  as  the  God  of  Poetry  and  the  Arts, 
ought  to  have  been  a  gentleman ;  but  he  was 
so  under  the  dominion  of  self  and  passion,  that, 
when  King  Laomedon  refused  him  the  prom- 
ised reward  for  helping  to  build  the  walls  of 
Troy,  he  raised  a  pestilence  and  destroyed 
the  king's  subjects.  Moreover,  the  infliction 
of  plagues  was  one  of  his  functions,  —  one 
surely  not  compatible  with  the  feelings  of  a 
gentleman. 

Among  the  Homeric  Heroes  we  discover 
but  one  gentleman.  It  is  not  Achilles  ;  for 
no  gentleman  would  have  tied  the  slain  body 
of  the  enemy's  General  to  his  chariot,  and 
then  dragged  it  on  the  earth  round  the  walls 
of  the  besieged  city  in  sight  of  its  wailing 
people.  Nor  is  it  Ulysses  ;  for  he,  a  finished, 
fascinating  man  of  the  world,  was  the  greatest 
liar  of  Antiquity.  It  is  Hector,  the  gener- 
ous, just,  true-hearted  Hector,  who,  by  one  of 
those  irreversible  perversities  that  immortalize 
a  wrong,  (like  the  immeasurable  robbery  com- 
mitted on  Columbus  in  the  naming  of  our  con- 
tinent,) has  been  made — he  among  the  brav- 


IDEALS.  79 

est  and  most  unboastful  of  warriors — to  give 
a  name  to  the  braggart's  mouthing,  and  is  thus 
perennially  pursued  by  a  calumny. 

From  the  idealizations  of  the  Greeks  we 
now  turn  to  those  of  the  moderns,  for  such 
furtherance  as  can  be  had  from  them  hi  our 
search  of  gentlemen.  And  let  no  one  be 
alarmed  or  discouraged  by  the  mention  of 
idealizations  and  ideals.  Nothing  is  so  prac- 
tical as  the  ideal,  which  is  ever  at  work  to  up- 
hold and  to  better  the  real.  The  ideal  is  in- 
deed only  the  real  seized  at  a  deeper  layer 
than  is  yet  cognizable  to  common  discernment. 
It  is  the  catching  sight,  by  the  watchers  on 
the  foretop,  of  a  real  which  we  have  not  come 
up  to,  and  which  the  crowd  on  deck  cannot  yet 
make  out.  The  obvious,  actualized  real,  taken 
simply  by  itself,  unlinked  to  the  past,  out  of 
which  it  has  sprung,  to  the  future,  towards 
which  it  ought  to  tend,  were  desolate  and 
dead.  Were  daily  life  to  cease  to  be  exhila- 
rated by  hope,  —  which  is  the  teemful  mother 
of  the  ideal,  —  it  would  grow  irremediably 
base  and  dull,  and  the  earth  would  become 


80  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

peopled  with  Calibans.  Men,  to  be  men,  must 
be  ever  looking  beyond  the  present  and  actual, 
even  of  the  earth.  If  all  are  not  large  and 
bold  enough  for  the  building  of  lofty  castles 
in  the  air,  not  one  but  has  tried  his  imagina- 
tive hand  on  an  unambitious  mansion,  or  a  still 
more  modest  cottage.  Was  there  ever  a  moth- 
er who  was  not  a  poet  for  her  child  ?  It  is 
with  this  superior,  dreamt-of,  hoped-for  exist- 
ence, with  this  subtle  promise,  with  these  at- 
tainable possibilities,  that  the  highest,  the  cre- 
ative minds,  have  ever  been  busied.  The 
great  books  of  the  world  are  records  of  striv- 
ings after,  of  partial  realizations  of,  a  better 
than  there  was  when  they  were  conceived. 
None  others  survive  but  those  whose  authors 
have  intuition  and  strength  to  go  deeper  and 
higher  than  present  actualities.  A  French 
writer  has  said,  "  The  masses  have  the  sense 
of  the  ideal."  If  they  had  it  not,  humanity 
had  never  emerged  out  of  savage  crudeness. 
Through  this  sense  it  is  that  improvements  and 
reformations  are  practicable  :  to  this  prophets 
and  poets  appeal. 


IDEALS.  81 

The  Poet  goes,  and  must  go, — he  is  no  poet 
if  he  cannot,  —  below  the  surface,  and  there 
be  able  to  appreciate  and  appropriate  more  or 
less  of  the  essence  that  has  not  manifested  it- 
self in  phenomena  or  appearances  to  the  gen- 
eral gaze.  He  first  makes  them  manifest. 
Nay  more,  no  one  can  even  depict  actual  ap- 
pearances, the  visible  outward,  which  is  effect, 
without  insight  into,  and  sympathy  with,  the 
invisible  inward,  which  is  cause.  To  him  who 
would  correctly  represent  the  real,  the  ideal 
must  be  vividly  present,  and  according  to  the 
depth  and  truth  of  the  ideal  conception  will 
be  the  fidelity  of  the  representation  of  the 
real.  But  for  the  presence  of  ideals,  draw- 
ing our  regards  into  the  undivulged  deeps  of 
human  potentialities,  far  beneath  the  froth  and 
scum  whipped  up  by  endless  eddies  of  selfish- 
ness, common  life  would  be,  to  the  finer  organ- 
izations, unendurable,  and  many  of  the  best 
spirits  would  be  driven,  like  the  anchorites  of 
old,  to  segregate  themselves  from  the  daily 
haunts  of  men,  and  shun  the  din  and  discords 
of  traffic  and  ignoble  aspiration,  to  save  them 


82  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

selves  from  an  ever-freshened  sadness  and  a 
never-respited  despair. 

Turning  from  the  Ancients  to  the  Moderns, 
from  Homer  we  pass  easily  to  Shakspeare. 
But  before  leaving  the  Ancients,  let  me  add  a 
mitigating  word. 

The  highest  forces  in  man,  the  moral,  are 
slow  to  unfold  and  ripen.  The  Greeks  and  the 
Romans  and  the  Hebrews,  although  to  us  an- 
cient, lived  in  the  youth,  were  the  youth,  of  hu- 
manity. How  gradual  is  the  growth  of  the  moral 
power,  we  learn  from  our  present  selves,  who, 
so  incalculably  beholden  to  it,  show  yet  such 
partial  allegiance  to  the  exalting  rule  of  char- 
ity, justice,  and  spiritual  freedom.  Never- 
theless there  having  been,  under  Christian  in- 
fluences, a  steady  moral  growth,  the  modern 
conscience  is  a  finer,  stancher  thing  than  the 
ancient.  Saving  Socrates  and  a  few  excep- 
tionally upstretching  natures,  no  ancient  had 
the  depth  and  stability  of  moral  conviction, 
the  breadth  of  principles,  which  millions  of 
moderns  have  and  live  by.  Only  with  a  Chris- 
tian development  comes  a  general  conscious- 


IDEALS.  83 

ness  of  divine  help  in  all  good  work.  To  the 
Heathen  the  superhuman  was  counterhuman. 
He  did  not  feel  to  the  full,  that  a  high  con- 
science has  ever  an  unfailing  friend  in  God. 


VII. 


SHAKSFEARE'S  HISTORICAL  PLATS  —  PROSPERO  —  ORLANDO  —  ANTONIO 

—  THE  HEAL  MARRIED  TO  THE  IDEAL  —  SIR  ROGER  DE  COVERLET  —  • 
Mr  UNCLE  TOBY  —  DON  QUIXOTE  —  SCOTT  —  COLERIDGE  —  SHELLEY 

—  BYRON  —  HIGH-BRED   TONE  IN   WRITING  —  BCRNS  —  KEATS  — 
SHAKSPEARE. 


rPHOUGH  the  gentleman  be  an  aesthetic  per- 
sonage, fragrant,  like  poetry,  with  the 
aroma  of  life,  he  needs,  as  we  have  said,  a 
sound  moral  pith  for  his  full  florescence  ;  and 
hence  the  Homeric  Gods  and  Heroes  come  not 
up  to  the  highest  standard  of  gentlemanly 
manhood.  Nor  in  Shakspeare  should  we  look 
in  the  historical  plays  for  exemplifications  of 
the  gentlemanly  ;  for,  through  the  long  dy- 
nastic contests,  which  for  several  generations 
kept  the  soil  of  England  wet  with  successive 
showers  of  native  blood,  the  persistent  com- 
batants, kings  and  princes  and  nobles,  were 
assuredly  as  perfidious,  conscienceless,  ruth- 
less, remorseless,  sanguinary  a  file  of  practi- 
cally heathen  villains  and  ruffians  as  a  poet 


SHAKSPE ARE'S  HISTORICAL  PLAYS.     85 

could  anywhere  find  to  work  with.  The  times 
were  coarse  and  cruel,  black  with  plots,  assas- 
sinations, and  executions.  Men  had  not  time 
or  opportunity  to  be  gentlemen.  A  Sidney  or 
a  Bayard  would  hardly  have  made  himself 
scope.  Hotspur,  and  his  rival  Prince  Hal, 
though  not  darkly  stained,  as  so  many  others, 
are  rude,  —  gentlemen  in  posse  rather  than  in 
esse;  and  Hotspur  is  wilful, — though  Heaven 
forbid  that  we  should  wish  him  other  than  he 
is  by  a  tittle ;  and  the  great  Faulconbridge  is 
coarse,  as  .becomes  him  to  be ;  nor  would  we 
exchange  his  rough  tongue  for  a  score  of 
smoother  ones,  for  such  catching  vigor  is  there 
in  his  vaulting  speech,  that  the  reading  of  him 
aloud  before  breakfast  were,  to  a  poetical  dys- 
peptic, an  appetizing  tonic. 

Albeit  the  tragedy  of  Lear  is  not  historical, 
being  wrought  into  its  thrilling  grandeur  out 
of  fable  and  tradition,  we  may  —  knowing 
what  England  has  since  become — invest  Kent 
with  historic  reality,  and  behold  in  him  a  pre- 
venient  representative  of  all  fidelity,  loyalty, 
self-devotion ;  exhibiting  superb  proportions,  be- 


86  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

nignant  capabilities ;  carrying  within  his  lordly 
heart  the  germs  which,  beneath  the  future  Sun 
of  Culture,  were  to  be  warmed  into  a  breed  of 
bountiful  gentlemen.  And  the  same  sublime 
tragedy  has  a  mate  to  Kent  in  "  France,"  who 
eagerly  takes  for  his  Queen  Lear's  disowned 
and  dowerless  daughter,  with  a  gush  of  gener- 
ous warmth  that  prefigures  Bayard,  addressing 
her, — 

"  Fairest  Cordelia,  that  art  most  rich,  being  poor; 
Most  choice,  forsaken ;  and  most  loved,  despised !  " 

Prospero,  the  wrongfully  deposed  Duke  of 
Milan,  is  a  magnificent  gentleman.  His  Duchy 
was  the  first  through  all  the  Seignories,  — 

"  And  Prospero  the  prime  Duke,  being  so  reputed 
In  dignity,  and  for  the  liberal  arts 

Without  a  parrellel, 

Neglecting  worldly  ends,  all  dedicate 

To  closeness  and  the  bettering  of  my  mind.1' 

His  gentleness  and  sweet  parental  tenderness, 
his  cordial  joy  in  forgiving  his  wrongers,  his 
long-nurtured  gratitude  to  Gonzalo,  his  super- 
regal  graciousness,  all  crowned  by  a  subtle, 
majestic  intellect,  make  Prospero  a  peer  of  the 
supreme  creations  of  poetry,  a  master  to  teach 


ORLANDO.  87 

and  exalt  manhood,  a  figure  whose  amplitude 
and  beauty  "  cannot  be  measured  or  con- 
fined." 

Orlando,  in  As  You  Like  It,  whose  un- 
natural brother,  —  to  quote  Orlando's  own 
words,  — "  Keeps  me  rustically  at  home,  or, 
to  speak  more  properly,  stays  me  here  at 
home  unkept,"  and  "  mines  my  gentility  with 
my  education,"  has  in  him  "  a  something  that 
Nature  gave  him,"  which  keeps  him  fine  in 
spite  of  coarse  nurture,  and  buoys  him  up 
through  the  beatings  of  adverse  fortune  to  the 
high  place  which  was  his  even  more  by  nobility 
of  disposition  than  by  birth.  That  Adam,  an 
old  family-servant, — 

"  In  whom  so  well  appears 
The  constant  service  of  the  antique  world 
When  service  sweat  for  duty  not  for  meed," — 

who  says  of  himself, — 

"  Though  I  look  old,  yet  am  I  strong  and  lusty ; 
For  in  my  j-outh  I  never  did  apply 
Hot  and  rebellious  liquors  in  my  blood ; 
Nor  did  not  with  unbashful  forehead  woo 
The  means  of  weakness  and  debility;  " — 

r 

that  Tie  should  be  fervently  willing  to  devote 


88  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

to  his  young  master  himself  and  the  hoard  he 
had  saved  to  be  the  "foster-nurse"  of  his  age, 
is  testimony  more  absolute  for  Orlando  than 
even  the  love  of  Rosalind ;  for  maidens  — 
princess  or  shepherdess  —  will  sometimes  be- 
stow the  whole  treasure  of  a  virgin  heart  upon 
one  whose  fairness  is  chiefly  of  the  outside. 
But  how  fully  is  the  inward  beauty  of  Orlando 
proclaimed  by  the  churlish  tribute  of  his  bad 
brother,  and  by  the  spontaneous  ejaculations 
of  Adam,  prompted  by  his  fears,  when  he 
meets  Orlando  before  the  house  of  Oliver ; 
and  how  distinctly  do  his  words  portray  the 
leading  features  of  a  gentleman :  — 

"  What !  my  young  master  ?  0,  my  gentle  master, 
0,  my  sweet  master;  O,  you  memory 
Of  old  Sir  Rowland!    Why,  what  make  you  here? 
Why  are  you  virtuous?  why  do  people  love  you? 
And  wherefore  are  you  gentle,  strong,  and  valiant  ? 
Why  would  you  be  so  fond  to  overcome 
The  bony  priser  of  the  humorous  Duke? 
Your  praise  has  come  too  swiftly  home  before  you. 
Know  you  not,  Master,  to  some  kind  of  men 
Their  graces  serve  them  but  as  enemies? 
No  more  do  yours ;  your  virtues,  gentle  master 
Are  sanctified  and  holy  traitors  to  you. 
0,  what  a  world  is  this,  when  what  is  comely  • 
Envenoms  him  that  bears  it!  " 


AS  YOU  LIKE  IT.  89 

Not  a  comedy  of  Shakspeare  so  teems  with 
wit  and  wisdom  and  poetry  as  this  of  As  You 
Like  It,  whose  plot  and  framework  are  laid 
with  purpose  to  allow  the  poet  a  riotous  liber- 
ty, freest  scope  for  a  joyous,  audacious  fancy, 
unrestrained  but  by  its  own  law.  This  beau- 
tiful, most  sparkling,  and  sunny  of  comedies  is 
spiced,  too,  with  a  flavor  of  personality ;  for 
in  its  bounding,  gleesome,  exuberance  we  think 
we  perceive,  poetically  mirrored,  an  individual 
joy,  the  gladness  of  the  liberated  poet  on  turn- 
ing his  back,  as  was  his  frequent  wont,  upon 
London,  to  go  down  and  revel  in  Warwick- 
shire. It  is  a  poetic  transfiguration  of  coun- 
try life  and  landscape,  —  one  melodious,  many- 
voiced,  gurgling  song,  laden  with  the  poet's 
rural  memories  and  imaginations ;  the  twofold 
delight  in  his  work,  as  poet  and  man,  so  in- 
citing him,  that  not  a  drama  of  Shakspeare 
furnishes  so  many  golden  lines  and  phrases 
to  hearten  and  rejoice  the  floating  currency  of 
English  speech. 

I  have  been  lured  from  my  purpose,  which 
is,  not  to  characterize  this  great  comedy,  but 


90  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

to  mark  a  short  passage  in  it  that  is  relevant 
to  our  general  aim,  evincing  —  as  I  interpret 
it — more  than  a  dramatic  propriety,  some- 
thing that  may  be  termed  a  gentlemanly  jus- 
tice. In,  the  second  scene  of  the  first  act, 
the  wrestling  scene,  when  Celia  exclaims, — 
"  Here  comes  Monsieur  Le  Beau,"  Rosalind 
adds, — "With  his  mouth  full  of  news."  Then 
follows  his  account  of  the  sport  that  the  ladies 
have  lost,  namely,  the  breaking  of  three  men's 
ribs  by  Charles,  the  wrestler,  which  brings 
down  a  hit  from  Touchstone.  The  impression 
left  on  the  reader,  fortified  by  Le  Beau's  des- 
ignation as  "  A  courtier  attending  on  Fred- 
erick," the  Usurper,  is  that  of  a  frivolous, 
heartless  court-gossip ;  and  in  a  play  so  glad- 
some in  its  general  march,  so  gayly  fanciful 
in  its  combinations  and  contrasts  and  solutions, 
this  impression,  if  unremoved,  were  a  dra- 
matic defect.  Accordingly,  at  the  end  of  the 
long  scene,  Le  Beau  comes  back,  to  warn  Or- 
lando of  danger,  which  he  does  in  fine  iam- 
bics, and  with  a  manner  and  tone  friendly  and 
elevated,  proving  that  the  place  he  fills  of  an 


ANTONIO.  9l 

idle  talker  about  the  court,  is  one  imposed 
upon  him  (as  is  more  or  less  the  position  of  so 
many  people  in  a  factitious  world),  by  the 
tyranny  of  circumstances,  and  that  he  is  at 
bottom  a  man  of  heart  and  not  without  gen 
erosity. 

Antonio,  the  Merchant  of  Venice,  wins  our 
sympathy  by  what  he  is  even  more  than  by 
what  he  does ;  and  what  he  is  we  learn  in 
the  opening  scene,  from  the  genial  confidential 
relation  which  we  see  exists  between  him  and 
the  band  of  his  light-hearted  comrades,  who, 
treating  him  with  fraternal  familiarity,  evi- 
dently feel  him  to  be  their  superior,  whom 
they  love  as  much  as  they  esteem.  Affection- 
ate towards  them  all,  he  moves  among  them 
with  a  natural  stateliness,  which  is  the  un- 
forced expression  of  instinctive  grace,  and 
healthful,  moral  sensibility.  His  readiness 
with  his  purse  and  person,  and  his  "  extremest 
means"  to  aid  Bassanio,  —  who  is  already  in 
his  debt,  —  in  any  way  that  stands  "within 
the  eye  of  honor;"  his  untrafficking  spirit 
that  "lends  out  money  gratis,"  and  will  not 


92  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

let  him  sink  the  man  in  the  merchant;  hia 
compassionate  liberality,  that  had  delivered  so 
many  from  their  forfeitures  to  Shylock ;  all 
this  bespeaks  a  nature  of  the  most  dutiful  and 
the  noblest.  His  crowning  testimonial  is  the 
brief  letter  written  to  Bassanio  when  he  be- 
lieves himself  about  to  die  through  forfeiture 
of  the  bond,  —  a  letter  that,  in  its  tender  sad- 
ness and  generous  most  touchingly  disinter- 
ested consideration,  breathes  the  purest  spirit 
of  Christian  gentlemanhood. 

We  have  thus  noted,  for  our  purpose,  a  few 
of  the  choicest  among  the  gentlemen  that 
stand  immortal  models  in  the  pages  of  Shak- 
speare,  where  they  appear  —  as  the  same 
class  always  do  in  actual  life — spontaneously. 
In  no  instance  had  Shakspeare  a  direct  con- 
scious design  of  depicting  a  gentleman ;  but 
having,  as  a  chief  constituent  of  his  prodigal 
being,  a  true  and  rapturous  sense  of  the  beau- 
tiful in  life,  the  grace  of  gentlemanhood  falls 
naturally  and  inevitably  upon  his  nobler  and 
best-balanced  characters,  which  hereby  exhibit 
in  compact  artistic  form  that  intimate  marriage 


THE  IDEAL  AND  THE  REAL.          93 

between  the  ideal  and  the  real  which  is  of  the 
very  essence  of  creative  Art.  A  genuine 
work  of  Art  always  combines  generic  breadth 
with  throbbing  individuality,  —  that  is,  an  in- 
finite ideal  with  a  finite  real.  From  the  ideal 
comes  every  trait  of  beauty.  It  comes  thence, 
but  whither  does  it  go  ?  To  the  real.  If  it 
finds  no  heart-and-lung-endowed  individual,  it 
cannot  stop.  No  earthly  lodging  being  pro- 
vided, it  evaporates.  The  beautiful  is  a  heav- 
enly birth  seeking  an  earthly  home,  and  Shak- 
speare  stands  foremost  amongst  those  who  pro- 
vide it  with  one,  solid  and  sightly.  Let  me 
add,  in  illustration  of  the  principle,  that  in 
Racine  there  is  want  of  the  real  element,  — 
in  Moliere  of  the  ideal. 

The  incarnation  of  the  beautiful  in  what  we 
are  endeavoring  to  depict, — a  gentleman  of  the 
finest  type,  rare,  as  we  have  seen  in  real  life, 
is  rare  in  the  life  of  fiction.  Before  quitting 
this  attractive  field,  we  will  rest  our  attention 
for  a  few  moments  on  two  or  three  other  chil- 
dren of  the  imagination,  one  of  whom  is  as 
vividly  present  and  as  firmly  moulded  as  the 


94  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

gentlemen  of  Shakspeare.  But  first,  a  few 
words  about  one  less  distinguished,  who  tow- 
ards the  close  of  the  last  century  was  a  con- 
spicuous personage,  and  who,  if  not  now  so 
much  known  and  admired,  is  still  esteemed : 
Sir  Roger  cle  Coverley. 

The  mind  of  Addison  was  not  rich  or  in- 
tense enough  for  creativeness.  It  could  not 
be  wrought  to  a  white  heat.  Its  fire  was  too 
languid  and  too  stinted  in  fuel  for  fervent  im- 
aginative action.  Sir  Roger  de  Coverley  is  a 
benevolent  country-gentleman,  with  innocent 
patrician  eccentricities,  —  a  humorist  in  the 
superficial  practical  sense.  He  is  a  provincial 
gentleman,  still  further  limited  by  being  of  the 
"  Old  School,"  in  which  conventionalities  of 
class,  verbal  courtesy,  hat-in-hand  grimacery, 
assumed  too  much  to  themselves,  and,  under 
cover  of  a  thin  showy  costume  of  manner, 
made  men  pass  for  gentlemen,  from  whom,  if 
disrobed,  you  would  recoil  as  from  a  leper. 
Sir  Roger  needed  no  such  disguise,  for  his 
was  the  gentlemanliness  of  the  heart.  That 
the  best  blood  flowed  in  his  veins,  he  showed 


SIR  ROGER  DE  COVERLEY.  95 

by  his  conduct,  —  the  only  test  of  good  blood, 
— and  had  a  right  to  be  proud  of  one  of  his 
progenitors,  Sir  Humphrey  de  Coverley,  who 
"  was  in  his  dealings  as  punctual  as  a  trades 
man  and  as  generous  as  a  gentleman.  He 
would  have  thought  himself  as  much  undone 
by  breaking  his  word  as  if  it  were  to  be  fol- 
lowed by  bankruptcy."  —  Sir  Roger,  it  was 
said,  died  somewhat  suddenly,  Addison  fear- 
ing that  he  would  be  vulgarized  by  a  less  skil- 
ful hand  than  his  own.  That  Steele,  or  any 
other  of  the  "  Spectators,"  should  have  thrust 
his  pen  into  the  pages  dedicated  to  Sir  Roger, 
was  so  indelicate  a  disregard  of  a  colleague's 
artistic  rights,  a  breach  of  literary  propriety 
so  gross,  as  of  itself  to  prove  the  writer  dis- 
qualified for  the  refined  delineation  of  a  gen- 
tleman. Such  a  fear,  coupled  with  displeas- 
ure at  the  intrusion,  may  have  hastened  Sir 
Roger's  departure  ;  but  nevertheless,  his  por- 
trait was  already  finished. 

Far  broader  and  deeper,  more  poetical  and 
more  real,  is  "  my  Uncle  Toby,"  a  man  and  a 
gentleman  to  consort  with  whom  braces  one's 


96  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

moral  resolution.  A  character  more  exqui- 
sitely wrought,  in  its  conception  more  pro- 
foundly simple,  executed  with  a  more  vigilant 
truthfulness  and  a  subtler  delicacy,  does  not 
exist  in  literature.  Authors  and  critics  are 
fond  of  having  a  fling  at  Sterne,  and  some 
would  take  a  prude's  airs  over  him  for  a  few 
blotches  raised  by  an  erotic  fancy  on  the  un- 
fading pages  of  Tristram  Shandy.  When 
those  censures  happen  to  be  cleverly  worded, 
they  draw  the  public  gaze  for  a  moment ;  but 
at  best  they  are  but  verbal  rockets,  that  die 
the  instant  after  they  break  into  life,  while 
the  stars  towards  which  they  were  flung  come 
out  undimmed  forever.  The  whole  range  of 
prose-fiction  presents  no  group  artistically  so 
fine  as  that  collected  in  the  parlor  of  Shandy 
Hall  on  a  full  evening.  In  this  delectable  as- 
semblage the  most  captivating  figure  is  that  of 
"  my  Uncle  Toby,"  in  watching  whose  words 
and  movements,  the  tears  stealing  from  under 
the  emotion  of  beauty  are  at  times  drowned 
by  a  flood  from  the  depths  of  pathos. 

One   more   example   from   among  the  pro- 


THE  KNIGHT  OF  LA  MANCHA.        97 

geny  of  the  brain,  to  whom  genius  has  given 
a  warmth  that  makes  them  companions  and 
friends,  only  less  dear  and  profitable  to  the 
generations  of  men  than  the  great  predomi- 
nant spirits  whom  God  bestows  for  our  guid- 
ance. Of  this  mental  offspring  no  individual 
is  more  widely  and  cordially  cherished  than 
the  glory  and  pride  of  Spain, — the  renowned 
Knight  of  La  Mancha. 

If  the  reader  will  review  and  question  the 
individuals  we  have  cited  from  life  and  from 
fiction,  to  illustrate  our  theme,  he  will  discover, 
that  the  characteristic  common  to  them  all  is, 
the  readiness  of  each  one  to  go  out  of  and  be- 
yond himself.  The  more  heartily  and  grace- 
fully this  is  done,  the  finer  is  the  type  of  gen- 
tlemanhood.  In  every  instance,  from  Bay- 
ard to  "  my  Uncle  Toby,"  whether  the  deed 
be  generous  or  seemly,  substantial  or  formal, 
there  is  in  it  a  substitution  of  another  for  the 
doer,  a  suspension  of  his  own  desires  for  the 
fulfilment  of  the  desires  of  some  one  else,  the 
making  of  his  enjoyment  consist  in  the  impart- 
ing of  enjoyment  to  others.  And  this,  ex- 
7 


98  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

amined  closely,  will  prove  to  be  the  quality 
of  all  the  doings  peculiar  to  gentlemen,  from 
the  chivalrous  offering  of  one's  life,  to  pro- 
tect the  unprotected,  to  the  offering  of  a  bow, 
which  daily,  superficial,  transient  act  is,  sym- 
bolically viewed,  the  throwing  of  one's  self 
dutifully  towards  another.  To  do  an  honor- 
able deed  is,  to  subject  the  self  to  justice  and 
truth ;  to  do  a  dishonorable  one  is,  to  subject 
justice  and  truth  to  the  self.  "We  are  author- 
ized then  to  assert,  that  in  every  gentlemanly 
act  the  agent  unselfs  himself. 

And  this  is  the  cardinal  feature  in  the  life 
of  Don  Quixote.  Under  the  momentum  of  a 
heated  imagination  he  goes  forth  to  redress 
the  grievances  of  the  world.  The  unnatural 
heat  swells  him  to  heroic  purposes  and  proj- 
ects. The  eighteenth  chapter  of  the  second 
volume  has  an  enumeration  of  the  virtues  and 
acquirements  needed  in  a  Knight  Errant,  from 
which  we  learn  what  an  exalted  standard  the 
Don  strove  to  live  by.  The  disproportion  be- 
tween his  means  and  his  end,  is  the  measure 
of  his  hallucination  :  the  grandeur  of  the  end, 


DON  QUIXOTE.  99 

and  his  entire  self-dedication  to  it,  give  the 
elevation  of  his  nature.  Of  his  purse  or  his 
person  he  never  has  a  thought.  Whilst  others 
eat,  he  discourses  nobly  and  instructively  on 
high  themes;  when  his  companions  retire  to 
rest,  he  takes  station  outside  the  Inn-gate  to 
stand  sentinel  through  the  chilling  night,  and 
guard  them  from  danger.  His  extravagances 
are  always  chivalrous.  It  is  not  that  like  com- 
mon madmen  he  is  beside  himself:  he  goes  be- 
yond and  far  above  the  common  self.  He  cannot 
escape  being  called  a  madman,  but  in  his  mad- 
ness there  is  a  moral  method.  He  is  boun- 
teously mad,  —  a  madman  through  the  ideal 
magnificence  of  his  aims.  To  the  stoutest 
"  bulls  and  bears  "  on  "  'Change  "  a  gentleman 
of  fine  grain  would  seem  as  absurd  as  the  Don 
does  to  the  multitude.  There  are  more  San- 
chos  in  the  world  than  Quixotes.  And  is  not 
Sancho  —  who,  through  the  flattery  and  pres- 
sure of  his  greeds,  actually  gets  to  believe  hi 
the  Don  and  his  promises  —  as  mad  as  his  mas- 
ter ?  He  swallows  the  monstrosities  of  the 
Knight's  sublimated  fantasy,  because  they  give 


100  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

him  hope  of  the  everlasting  filling  of  his  belly. 
And  this  is  precisely  the  hallucination  of  all 
who  are  dominated  by  the  sensual  and  the 
worldly.  Cajoled  by  their  lower  desires,  they 
live  as  though  they  believed  in  the  everlasting- 
ness  of  fat  kitchens  and  of  fat  dividends,  and 
of  the  "  good  things"  these  can  buy,  and  they 
believe  that  through  buying  are  to  be  had  the 
best  things  of  life ;  refusing  to  know,  that 
when  they  shall  have  quitted  the  earth  they 
will  get  neither  hams  nor  hock,  and  that  the 
sensuous  earth  is  but  their  cradle  and  their 
nursery.  If  a  man,  reputed  sane,  could  be- 
think him,  what  and  how  he  will  be  a  hundred 
years  hence,  would  not  much  of  his  present 
strugglings  and  wrestlings  look  like  a  duel 
with  windmills  ?  But  he  will  not  thus  wisely 
bethink  him,  and  as  grossly  as  Don  Quixote 
mistook  garlic-breathed  wenches  for  Dulcineas, 
does  he  go  on  mistaking  mist  for  water,  and  a 
mirage  for  a  succulent  harvest.  Granted,  that 
the  immortal  Knight  is  mad,  we  will  not  stand 
by  and  hear  the  Sanchos  upbraid  him  with  his 
madness.  He  is  sublimely  not  vulgarly  mad. 


SCOTT.  101 

And  what  a  gentleman  he  is,  our  dear  delight- 
ful madman !  Who  does  not  look  to  have 
from  him,  in  whatever  encounter,  courtesy  and 
generosity  ?  Who  would  not  take  his  word 
as  soon  as  his  bond  ?  Who  would  not  trust 
wife  and  daughter  and  honor  and  purse  to  his 
keeping,  and  not  feel  that  they  were  safe. 

Cervantes  in  Don  Quixote  had  no  more 
direct  design  of  drawing  a  gentleman  than 
Shakspeare  had  in  Prospero.  Possibly,  even 
with  them,  the  pre-resolve  would,  in  any  such 
attempt,  have  frustrated  itself  and  have  weak- 
ened the  execution,  just  as  in  real  life  the  live- 
lier colors  of  gentlemanhood  pale  before  cal- 
culation or  consciousness.  In  one  of  his  later 
novels  Scott  attempted  to  embody  a  gentle- 
man. The  way  to  make  one  with  the  pen  is 
the  same  as  to  make  one  out  of  flesh  and 
blood.  Take  a  warm,  strong,  true  man,  with 
arteries  exquisitely  red  with  sensibility,  and  let 
his  rich  instincts  have  the  discipline  of  sharp 
self-culture  working  on  outward  trials,  with  so 
much  opportunity  for  choice  intercourse  as  is 
necessary  for  the  play  of  the  finer  sympathies. 


102  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

To  work  after  this  fashion  with  the  pen  re- 
quires high  forgetive  resources.  Scott,  genial 
and  humane,  fell  short  of  this  imaginative  su- 
premacy. Coleridge,  with  his  feminine  refine- 
ment and  superb  endowments,  could  have  done 
it,  had  he  not  lacked  will  to  execute  a  con- 
ception requiring  sustained  minute  labor ;  or 
Shelley,  except  that  in  his  mind  there  was 
a  taint  of  morbidness ;  and  the  gentleman 
must  be  as  healthy  as  a  fir-tipt  mountain-top. 
Wordsworth,  with  all  his  visionary  percipience 
and  thoughtful  sensibility,  wanted  the  con- 
creting gift,  and  somewhat,  too,  the  Christian 
glow ;  and  thence  he  does  not  succeed  at  im- 
personation. Byron's  nature  was  too  animal 
and  unnoble  ;  and  however  in  his  higher  moods 
he  could  have  appreciated  the  disinterested- 
ness of  the  gentlemanly  essence,  his  thoughts 
could  not  have  been  kept  of  that  pure  hue, 
but  would  inevitably  have  become  streaked 
with  his  native  insuperable  selfishness. 

Aside  from  the  creation  of  characters,  which 
implies  felicitous  poetic  power,  the  pages  of 
some  writers  are  pervaded  by  a  chaste  and 


BURNS  — KEATS— SHAKSPEARE.    103 

generous  spirit.  This  high-bred  tone,  the  fruit 
evidently  of  unworldliness  and  superior  truth- 
fulness and  sanctity,  is  especially  noticeable, 
I  think,  in  Spenser,  in  Coleridge,  in  Jeremy 
Taylor,  in  De  Quincey,  in  Shelley.  Its  pres- 
ence presupposes  fineness  in  the  texture  of  the 
brain,  with  cordiality  and  spontaneity  of  mind 
and  modesty  of  nature.  In  others,  equal  in 
force  and  even  truthfulness,  it  is  not  so  ob- 
servable ;  and  is  still  less  in  the  class  of  clever 
ambitious  writers,  in  whom  there  is  a  restless 
aim  at  effect  and  immediate  sensation,  as  in 
several  of  the  popular  living  novelists,  who  are 
thence  more  or  less  tainted  with  vulgarity. 

The  genuine  poet  is  ex  officio  a  gentleman. 
In  the  proudest  drawing-rooms  of  Europe  the 
peasant  Burns  would  have  moved  with  un- 
taught ease  and  propriety,  the  accepted  mate 
of  the  highest  born  and  the  highest  bred. 
Cowden  Clarke,  the  friend  of  Keats,  has  a 
right  to  say  of  that  superlative  genius,  that 
"  had  he  been  born  in  squalor  he  would  have 
emerged  a  gentleman."  And  Shakspeare ! 
what  a  genial,  fascinating,  graceful,  radiant 


104  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

gentleman  he  must  have  been.  His  gallery 
of  women  proclaims  him  such  as  absolutely  as 
the  works  of  Raphael  proclaim  him  a  poet. 
Were  ladyhood  to  be  struck  by  some  spiritual 
plague,  and  so  vanish  from  the  earth,  it  would 
find  a  sanctuary  in  the  pages  of  Shakspeare, 
whence  could  be  restored  its  most  distin- 
guished type.  As  rainbow  and  lightning  in 
the  sunny  morning  vapor,  within  the  young 
abounding  brain  of  Shakspeare  lay  tenderly 
unconsciously  coiled  the  beauty  and  power  of 
manhood  and  of  womanhood,  to  unwind  and 
shape  themselves  in  his  broadened,  deepened 
years,  permeating  and  vivifying  the  peopled 
Paradise  he  evoked,  to  be  for  his  race  a  joy 
and  a  nourishment  forever. 


VIII. 

THE  MORAL  AND  THE  POETICAL — THEIR  ALLIANCE  IN  GENTLEMAN- 
HOOD —  THE  GENERIC  —  THE  "LIBERAL"  PROFESSIONS  —  IMPAR- 
TIALITY OP  NATURE — MANNERS — LORD  CHESTERFIELD. 

TT7E  will  now  descend  from  these  altitudes, 
up  to  which  we  have  been  drawn  by  the 
necessities  not  less  than  by  the  attractions  of 
our  subject.  The  descent  will  not  be  sudden ; 
for  the  aesthetic,  or  poetic,  being  a  cardinal 
element  in  gentlemanhood,  when  the  moral 
power,  to  which  it  and  all  else  yields  the  chief 
place,  ceases  to  act  in  its  fullest  force  —  as 
it  does  act  in  the  transcendent  few  whom  we 
have  cited  —  the  aesthetic,  which  in  those  few 
even  was  essential  to  their  brilliancy,  becomes 
more  notable,  and,  among  men  of  not  pre- 
dominant moral  strength,  gives  superiority  ac- 
cording to  the  measure  of  its  presence.  As 
the  lives  of  Sidney  and  Bayard  were  poetry 
in  action,  so  every  gentleman  is,  according  to 
his  degree,  a  practical  poet,  the  poetical  mani- 


106  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

Testing  itself,  not  in  the  beauty  of  verses,  but 
in  the  beauty  of  conduct.  In  the  poetic  ema- 
nation there  is  a  cleansing  virtue  which  con- 
fers on  him  from  whom  it  flows  interior  tone 
as  well  as  outward  lustre.  An  inward  font 
of  poetry  keeps  the  mind  agitated  by  its  cur- 
rent, and  thus  purged  of  dross.  If  the  font 
gets  fouled  by  the  neighborhood  of  base  qual- 
ities, its  flow  slackens,  (as  has  been  strikingly 
shown  in  some  poets),  and  the  man  slips  from 
his  height  of  gentlemanhood. 

The  alliance  hi  gentlemanhood  between  the 
moral  and  the  poetical  is  not  accidental  or 
temporary  or  superficial ;  it  is  essential  and 
permanent  —  a  union  of  absolute  interdepend- 
ence, an  indissoluble  intimacy,  reciprocally 
grateful  and  indispensable.  The  moral  needs 
the  poetical  for  its  full  vivification  and  enlarge- 
ment :  the  poetical,  lacking  the  moral,  is 
scanted  in  its  best  juices,  and  soon  shrivels, 
and  runs  to  coxcombry  and  affectation,  if  not 
into  paralyzing  vice  and  impoverishing  selfish- 
ness. In  short,  gentlemanhood  needs  what  all 
concomitants  and  constituents  of  civilization 


THE  MORAL  AND  THE  POETICAL.    107 

need,  —  a  moral  basis  ;  without  which  basis 
civilization  bears  neither  flowers  nor  fruit  — 
nay,  without  which,  civilization  were  not,  and 
could  not  be. 

In  the  majority  of  men  the  moral  power  is 
regulative  not  motive.  Few  are  the  Oberlins 
and  Howards  and  Pauls.  Men  of  sound  na- 
tures are  not  all,  like  these  ethical  geniuses, 
impelled  by  the  moral  element,  they  are  re- 
strained by  it;  not  driven,  like  them,  into 
virtuous  excesses,  but  withheld  from  vicious. 
Descended  then  from  the  heights  where  we 
have  tarried  so  long,  we  find  ourselves  on  an 
expansive  level,  —  not  by  any  means  a  dead 
level  or  a  low,  but  a  live  level  and  a  high,  ani- 
mated by  numberless  inequalities,  and  ranging 
above  the  flats  of  multitudinous  humanity, — 
a  broad  plateau,  in  sight  of  and  enclosed  by 
the  breezy,  luminous  heights  already  described, 
and  large  enough  to  give  free  movement  to  the 
eliminated  crowd,  who  —  claiming,  and  more  or 
less  possessing,  the  superiorities  which,  resting 
on  a  moral  basis,  are  built  up  by  aesthetic  cul- 
ture —  constitute  by  general,  tacit,  and  not  al- 


108  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

ways  willing  consent,  the  class  of  gentlemen, 
a  class,  the  boundaries  of  which  are  not  very 
definitely  marked. 

The  gentlemanly  always  involves  poetic  cul- 
ture, or  —  as  in  its  lowest  aspects  —  conform- 
ity to  the  results  thereof,  even  if  the  culture 
show  itself  but  superficially  and  outwardly. 
Faint  or  orient  the  spirit  of  beauty  shines 
through  the  gentleman ;  and  beauty  always 
implies  something  that  is  neither  circumscribed 
nor  petty.  Aristotle  says,  "  Poetry  is  more 
philosophic,  and  more  deserving  of  attention 
than  history ;  for  poetry  speaks  more  of  uni- 
versals,  history  of  particulars."  And  poetry, 
it  may  be  added,  deals  with  universals  because 
its  staple  is  feeling,  which  it  illustrates  and 
ennobles  by  a  refined  fidelity,  a  truthful  exal- 
tation. The  gentleman  (who  never  would 
have  been  were  there  not  in  the  heart  of  hu- 
manity a  craving  for  the  beautiful,  what  we 
may  term  the  poetic  instinct)  asserts  his  claim 
by  signs  of  breadth — a  breadth  which  is  the 
result  of  susceptibility  to  the  beautiful,  wrought 
upon  by  commerce  with  the  world ;  like  a  peb- 


THE  GENERIC.  109 

ble  on  the  beach,  which  gives  evidence  of  hav- 
ing been  rounded  and  smoothed  by  attrition 
with  thousands  of  others,  all  mingled  and 
shaken  and  rolled  together  by  the  heave  of 
the  limitless  world  of  waters.  As  there  are 
stones  of  so  loose  a  substance  as  to  be  crum- 
bled by  the  waves  of  the  sea,  or  so  rugged  as 
to  be  incapable  of  smoothness,  some  men  are 
crushed  instead  of  being  polished  by  the 
world's  pressure,  and  some  refuse  to  be  pol- 
ished ;  and  the  smoothed  and  rounded,  unless 
in  addition  to  evenness  of  texture  they  have 
a  lasting  preciousness  of  quality,  will  not  be 
lifted  up  to  sparkle  in  the  crowns  that  begem 
the  forehead  of  humanity,  but  will  remain  in 
the  pile  of  shapely  pebbles. 

The  generic  being  demanded  in  the  gentle- 
manly character,  the  specific  is  a  detraction 
therefrom.  Thence,  whatever  is  local  or  per- 
sonal, provincial  or  professional,  is  inconsistent 
therewith,  and,  if  not  countervailed  by  a  more 
than  common  individual  breadth  and  aesthetic 
generosity  of  nature,  will  be  fatal  to  one's  pre- 
tension. The  smell  of  the  shop  is  not  fragrant 


110  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

in  the  nostrils  of  gentlemanhood.  The  more 
petty  and  circumscribing  the  occupation,  the 
more  obstructive  it  is  to  the  growth  of  gentle- 
manhood.  Thence,  the  "liberal"  professions 
and  wholesale  counting-rooms  feed  its  ranks, 
which  get  little  sustenance  from  the  retail 
counter  or  the  journeyman  workshop,  the  lim- 
ited routine  of  the  latter  implying  contraction 
and  belittling  confinement  of  the  faculties  and 
aspirations.  So,  on  the  Continent  of  Europe 
—  where  feudal  prescriptions  have  been  in- 
vaded and  disrupted,  but  by  no  means  sub- 
dued —  even  the  liberal  professions  and  upper 
commerce  are  excluded  from  the  highest  cir- 
cles ;  and  that,  not  on  account  of  blood,  —  for 
many  of  the  socially  best  born  drop,  through 
weakness,  out  of  these  circles,  —  but  because 
mercenary  occupations  are  presumed  to  at- 
taint the  freedom  and  largeness  and  inde- 
pendence, which  are  the  conditions  of  a  high 
gentlemanhood.  And  this  they  surely  do,  un- 
less their  temptations  are  counteracted  by  in- 
dividual nobleness  and  purity.  The  habit  of 
acquisitive  eagerness,  of  buying  as  cheap  arid 


IMPARTIALITY  OF  NATURE.        Ill 

selling  as  dear  as  possible,  eats  into  the  mar- 
row of  manliness ;  and  overreaching  and  crafty 
trafficking  are  as  incompatible  with  gentleman 
hood  as  perjury  is  with  piety. 

But  what  is  best  in  humanity  proceeding 
from  an  inward  motion,  and  Nature  not  being 
partial,  the  gentleman  springs  up  spontane- 
ously in  all  circles,  and  at  times  with  such  an 
inborn  equipment  as  to  resist  the  crush  of  ad- 
verse circumstances.  On  the  other  hand,  the 
righteous  impartiality  of  Nature  exhibits  many 
of  the  externally  most  favored  as  impotent  to 
profit  by  their  privilege,  the  oldest  escutcheons 
being  tarnished  at  tunes  with  the  stains  of 
faithlessness  and  sycophancy,  and  now  that 
gold  is  more  than  ever  a  necessary  support 
to  rank,  the  high-born  showing  themselves  en- 
thralled by  its  lusts,  and  drooping  with  the 
meannesses  and  falsehoods  that  attend  an  ig- 
noble devotion  to  its  possession ;  while  behind 
the  aprons  of  coarse  labor  we  meet  occasionally 
with  traits  of  nobleness  and  refinement,  that 
were  lessons  for  him  who  has  improved  good 
opportunities,  and  that  put  to  shame  many  an 
accidental  gentleman. 


112  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

I  am  casting  too  deep  a  line,  peering  too 
searchingly  below  the  surface,  it  will  be  urged : 
manner  and  air  go  for  so  much  in  the  gentle- 
man. But  manner  and  air — except  in  the 
counterfeit  gentleman,  who  is  soon  detected  — 
are  due  to  what  is  inward.  Habits  of  carriage 
are  the  fruit  of  habits  of  feeling.  A  man  of 
low  sentiments  will  betray  ignobility,  however 
tutored  he  may  have  been  in  polished  schools  ; 
nor  will  the  proudest  pedigree  insure  the 
wearer  of  a  ducal  coronet  against  coarseness 
and  foulness  of  nature  and  their  infallible  out- 
ward manifestation. 

Good  manners  are  so  much  a  passport,  that 
worldlings — especially  those  whose  way  has  not 
been  made  for  them,  but  who  have  to  make  it 
for  themselves  —  cultivate  them  assiduously, 
school  themselves  with  laborious  watchfulness, 
and  make  themselves  —  the  most  tractable  of 
them  —  so  superficially  proficient,  as  to  climb 
by  means  of  a  fair  outside  with  cat-like  quiet- 
ness and  agility.  Such  men  are  not  masters 
in  manners :  they  are  masters  of  the  art  of 
manners.  They  use  manners  to  seem  to  be 


MANNERS.  113 

what  they  are  not :  they  act  manners.  One 
of  the  best  touchstones  of  the  genuineness  of 
gentlemanhood  is  the  bearing  of  a  man  with 
inferiors.  Turn  one  of  these  well-mannered, 
self-seekers  into  a  hovel,  and  his  silken  speech 
and  pliant  guise  drop  from  him  as  suddenly  as 
his  regal  port  does  behind  the  scenes  from  the 
buskin  ed  king,  or  his  cloak  from  the  muffled 
villain ;  and  the  smiling,  climbing  time-server 
stands  unkinged  in  ungentlemanly  harshness 
and  heartlessness.  No  man  need  or  ought  to 
comport  himself  to  all  persons  at  all  times  with 
one  uniform  style ;  but  a  true  gentleman, 
(though  not  necessarily  bounteous,)  is  never 
harsh  and  unfeeling,  and  has  it  for  a  law  of  con- 
duct, to  be  uncivil  to  no  one. 

There  is  an  easy  self-possessed  carriage,  ac- 
quired (by  the  capable)  through  hereditary  or 
habitual  association  with  the  well-bred,  a  sup- 
ple conformity  to,  or  rather,  a  genial  concord- 
ance with,  the  demands  of  good-breeding,  an 
unobtrusive  polish,  which  denotes  the  man  of 
the  world,  and  is  the  armor  of  the  gentleman, 
and  is  as  much  expected  in  refined  drawing- 
8 


114  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

rooms  as  washed  hands  and  clean  linen.  And 
among  men  of  a  certain  range  of  social  com- 
merce there  exists  a  free-masonry,  without 
compact  or  outward  badge,  whereby  through 
subtle  indications  —  lost  upon  the  uninitiated 
—  they  at  once  accredit  each  other,  and  in- 
stantly feeling  at  ease,  unbend,  are  communi- 
cative, and  even,  trivially,  confidential.  This 
subtle  rapport,  created  by  a  life  of  familiarity 
with  the  higher  social  circles,  consisting  in 
a  nameless  tone,  an  indefinable  presence,  an 
indescribable,  imponderable,  sesthetic  aura,  is 
nevertheless  a  mere  bond  of  outward  rank, 
and  binds  so  little  intrinsically,  that  should  two 
strangers,  meeting  on  a  journey,  interchange 
silent  mutual  recognition  of  each  other  as 
members  of  this  ancient,  unmystical  order, 
and  thereupon  establish  harmonious  conversa- 
tional relations;  and  should  one  be  a  father 
and  the  other  a  bachelor  of  thirty,  the  father 
would  no  more  intrust  his  daughter  to  the  safe- 
keeping of  his  congenial  new  acquaintance 
than  he  would  indorse  his  note,  being  well 
aware,  that  command  of  the  bienseances  and 


MANNERS.  115 

colloquial  tone  of  good  company,  carrying 
though  it  does  membership  of  a  choice  ex- 
clusive confraternity,  and  the  select  result  of 
long  social  education,  is  yet  so  external,  that 
it  is  no  guarantee  of  honorable  conduct  or 
even  of  a  persistent  private  good  behavior; 
and  that  his  velvety,  well-mannered  companion 
may  possibly  be  a  fugitive  from  deluded  cred- 
itors, or  a  seducer  of  his  friend's  wife,  who, 
moreover,  should  you  cast  a  doubt  upon  his 
honor,  would  pistol  you  at  ten  paces. 

"We  will  prize  good  manners  at  their  real 
worth,  which  is  high,  when  they  are  truthful, 
when  they  faithfully  represent  what  the  heart 
is  and  wills.  Good  manners  promise  much : 
let  the  promise  be  fulfilled.  If  it  is  not, 
they  are  false  manners,  however  good  they 
may  look.  There  is  nothing  hypocritical  about 
the  genuine  gentleman,  and  the  heartiest 
would  rather  have  his  outward  mien  below 
than  above  his  interior  self,  and  under  no  cir 
cumstances  other  than  simple. 

There  needs  no  wide  experience  to  learn, 
that  a  man,  malleable  and  clever,  with  histri- 


116  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

onic  gifts,  can  put  on  good  manners,  and  wear 
them  with  an  air  so  original,  that  others  than 
the  dull-witted  will  be  taken  captive,  not  per- 
ceiving that  they  are  imitative  and  cuticular. 
A  man  of  this  stamp  plays  his  part  well ;  but 
he  is  a  social  actor,  not  a  gentleman.  Nay 
more ;  in  so  far  as  through  mannerliness  he 
deceives,  and  compasses  selfish  ends,  that  are 
at  times  to  others  injurious  or  ruinous,  he  is 
more  hateful  than  the  ruder  knave,  who  has 
not  the  art  to  get  currency  for  his  gilded  brass. 
It  is  true,  the  gentleman  is  known  by  his  man- 
ners, and  this  recognition  is  a  homage  ;  for  it 
implies,  that  in  his  bearing  there  is  neither 
effort  nor  artifice,  and  that  his  manners  are 
but  the  polish  of  a  fine  grain,  not  a  varnish  to 
make  the  grain  seem  finer  than  it  is,  or  to  dis- 
guise a  coarse.  The  gentleman  is  an  aesthetic 
fruit  on  an  ethic  stem  :  if  the  stem  be  not 
ethic,  the  fruit,  however  sightly,  bears  no 
handling,  and  if  eaten,  proves  to  be  bitter  or 
poisonous. 

Moreover,    all    men    nowadays,    even    the 
most  rustic,  are  by  general  civilization  con- 


LORD  CHESTERFIELD.  117 

strained  to  civility,  and  manners  being  oil  to 
the  wheels  of  worldly  progress,  a  polished  out- 
side is  almost  as  universal  as  are  coats  of  fine 
broadcloth  ;  so  that  many  a  man  is  externally 
urbane  who  is  not  a  gentleman,  —  wanting  as 
well  his  subtle  seemliness  as  his  deeper  trust- 
worthiness,—  though  entitled  to  recognition  for 
gentlemanlike  deportment.  And  so  much  has 
to  be  accorded  even  to  some  who  are  base  and 
slavish.  But  the  gentleman  has  fresh  impulses 
and  original  promptings,  under  which,  guided 
by  an  aesthetic  sense,  he  will  strike  through 
forms  tougher  than  those  of  outward  demeanor, 
and,  not  fearing  responsibility,  flash  into  acts 
of  startling  but,  captivating  boldness.  The 
gentleman  feels  his  inward  life  with  such  ful- 
ness and  vivacity,  that  he  careers  upon  the 
furrowed  sea  of  performance  with  triumphant 
power  of  resistance  and  self-direction.  Your 
worldling  may  be  a  gentleman,  but  not  of  the 
first  degrees :  he  is  too  much  under  outside 
dominion,  and  when  most  the  gentleman  is 
least  the  worldling. 

Lord   Chesterfield  was  a  worldling-gentle- 


118  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

man;  and  how  surely  the  gentleman  sinks 
when  the  worldling  is  in  the  ascendent  his 
doings  and  counsel  teach.  Enforcing  advice 
to  his  son  by  his  own  example,  he  tells  him 
that  on  entering  life,  "  my  great  object  was, 
to  make  every  man  I  met  with  like  me  and 
every  woman  love  me ;  "  that  is,  he  abased  the 
gentleman  to  satisfy  the  worldling.  In  any 
and  every  man  it  is  of  course  commendable  to 
desire  the  good-will  of  all  other  men;  but  to 
set  about  through  art  and  outside  to  make 
himself  liked  —  which  does  not  even  imply  a 
grounded  good  will  —  by  every  one  he  talks 
to,  is  to  be  weak  hi  that  masculine  self-respect 
which  is  a  preponderating  element  in  gentle- 
manhood.  It  is  daily  to  practise  the  fraudu- 
lence  of  the  demagogue  in  private  intercourse, 
to  become  a  bowing  beggar  of  all  passers  for 
the  small  change  of  approbation.  Look  at  an- 
other sample  of  paternal  advice,  bearing  in 
mind  that  he  to  whom  it  is  given  was  a  boy  of 
seventeen.  "Make  your  court  particularly, 
and  show  distinguished  attention,  to  such  men 
and  women  as  are  best  at  Court,  highest  in  the 


LORD   CHESTERFIELD.  119 

fashion,  and  in  the  opinion  of  the  public ; 
speak  advantageously  of  them  behind  their 
backs  in  companies  who  you  have  reason  to 
believe  will  tell  them  again." 

A  man  not  of  principles  but  of  expedients, 
Lord  Chesterfield  strove  to  cultivate  manners 
in  his  son  as  a  means  of  worldly  success,  es- 
pecially as  an  invaluable  aid  in  the  diplomatic 
career.  "  Even  polished  brass,"  he  tells  him, 
"  will  pass  upon  more  people  than  rough  gold." 
Add  to  this  the  following  sentence,  and  we 
have  the  texts  upon  which  were  written  most 
of  Chesterfield's  Letters  to  his  Son ;  "  The 
pleasures  of  low  life  are  all  of  this  mistaken, 
merely  sensual  and  disgraceful  nature  ;  where- 
as those  of  high  life  and  in  good  company 
(though  possibly  hi  themselves  not  more  mor- 
al) are  more  delicate,  more  refined,  less  dan- 
gerous and  less  disgraceful;  and  in  the  com- 
mon course  of  things,  not  reckoned  disgraceful 
at  all." 

Chesterfield  found  the  standard  of  gentle- 
manhood  low,  and  he  left  it  lower.  His  once 
famous  Letters  are  now  historical,  constituting 


120  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

an  instructive  document  on  one  province  of 
English  life,  towards  the  end  of  the  last  cen- 
tury ;  but,  fifty  and  forty  years  ago  they  were 
practical,  and  even  in  our  country  were  put 
into  the  hands  of  young  men  by  moral  fathers, 
who  had  not  read,  but  adopted  them  from  their 
English  fame  ;  and  gentlemanhood,  which  has 
since  revised  and  rejected  them  as  canon,  is 
not  yet  entirely  purged  of  the  virus  where- 
with they  poisoned  it. 

The  failure  of  Lord  Chesterfield  in  his  cher- 
ished aim  was  even  comical.  The  son  grew  up 
to  be  curiously  deficient  in  what  the  father  set 
so  much  store  by.  He  was  a  man  of  sense 
and  acquirement  with  common  manners,  and 
could  not  take  a  polish ;  and  possibly  for  this 
he  deserves  respect,  as  besides  aesthetic  inca- 
pacity it  may  have  indicated  a  native  honesty 
of  core.  He  was  more  the  gentleman  for  his 
very  plainness.  At  all  events,  not  being  born 
to  be  a  graceful,  winning  man  of  the  world,  all 
his  father's  discipline  and  persevering  pains 
could  not  make  him  one.  An  ancient  king 
of  Scotland,  being  under  weighty  obligation  to 


LORD   CHESTERFIELD.  121 

an  humble  woman,  offered  to  grant  any  favor 
she  would  ask.  "  Make  my  son  a  gentle- 
man," exclaimed  her  true  maternal  heart.  "  I 
can  make  your  son  a  nobleman :  I  cannot 
make  him  a  gentleman,"  rejoined  the  king, 
uttering  a  deeper  truth  than  he  knew ;  for  a 
man  must  be  born  a  gentleman  in  a  finer  sense 
than  the  word  commonly  imports. 


IX. 

HONOR — PERSONALITY — PRIDE  AND  VANITY — FASHION—  VULGARITY 

TNTO  the  texture  of  gentlemanhood  the  sen- 
timent  of  honor  enters  integrally  as  a  bra- 
cing constituent.  In  its  healthy  condition  honor 
is  the  accompaniment  and  complement  of  noble 
individuality.  The  single  man  is  vivified  and 
straightened  by  a  warm  sense  of  independent 
'self-subsistence,  whereof  honor  is  at  once  the 
offspring  and  the  guardian,  —  a  guardian  as 
sleepless  as  the  anxious  maternal -eye,  as  ten- 
der to  every  approaching  breath  as  an  aspen- 
leaf  in  June.  Honor  is  not  a  virtue  in  itself, 
it  is  the  mail  behind  which  the  virtues  fight 
more  securely.  A  man  without  honor  is  as 
maimed  in  his  equipment  as  an  accoutred 
knight  without  helmet.  Honor  is  not  simpje 
truthfulness  :  it  is  truthfulness  sparkling  with 
the  fire  of  a  susceptive  personality.  It  is 
something  more  than  an  ornament  even  to  the 


HONOR.  123 

loftiest ;  and  Alfred  and  Washington  had  been 
incomplete  without  it.  Originating  in  self- 
estimation,  it  yet  gives  no  countenance  to  the 
pretensions  of  egotism,  and  differs  as  much 
from  an  inflated  pride  as  a  dignified  self-re- 
spect does  from  the  stiffness  and  cold-pokerism 
of  self-conceit.  One  who  deserves  that  it  he 
fully  said  of  him,  that  he  is  a  man  of  honor, 
is  one  in  whom  uprightness  is  fortified  by  a 
keen  sense  of  personal  responsibility,  and 
honesty  is  made  graceful  and  stately  by  a 
spirited  self-reliance. 

The  honor  that  Hotspur  would  "  pluck  from 
the  pale-faced  moon — or  bottom  of  the  deep," 
and  that  is  the  subject  of  Falstaff's  catechism, 
is  a  synonyme  of  reputation — a  something  to 
be  conferred  by  others,  the  creation  of  an  out- 
side opinion,  in  which  sense  the  word  is  mostly 
used  by  Shakspeare,  in  the  singular  as  well  as 
the  plural.  That  which  can  neither  be  con- 
ferred nor  taken  away,  which  is  interior,  and 
inviolate  except  by  the  owner,  the  refined  es- 
sence of  the  noblest  selfhood,  we  now  express 
by  the  word  honor,  which  at  the  same  time 


124  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

retains  in  certain  relations  the  more  external 
meaning. 

As  some  of  the  best  things  become  by  per- 
version the  worst, — their  very  virtues  giving  a 
virulent  potency  to  poisons,  the  life-sustaining 
air  itself  carrying  when  foul  the  largest  freight 
of  death, — so  honor,  whose  name  is  a  promise 
of  purity  and  elevation,  is  liable  to  such  warp 
and  debasement,  as  to  be  turned  into  a  shield 
of  vice  and  be  forced  to  entwine  itself  defen- 
sively even  around  dishonor.  The  sovereignty 
of  self,  not  duly  tempered,  grows  despotic 
from  narrowness  and  blind  from  despotism, 
and,  mistaking  its  own  will  for  light,  decrees 
brown  to  be  white  and  foul  fair,  half-believing 
its  own  decree.  Men  who  have  betrayed 
weighty  trusts,  and  made  shipwreck  of  hon- 
esty, cling  with  a  wild,  semi-dubious  defiance 
to  honor,  or  rather  to  the  name,  and  challenge 
its  protection,  with  the  same  right  as  a  pirate 
would  that  of  a  great  nation's  flag  that  he  had 
flung  out  from  his  topmast  in  the  agony  of  de- 
feat. Even  the  blackleg  and  the  libertine 
strive  by  help  of  it  to  piece  out  their  rags 


HONOR.  125 

into  a  dress-suit,  and  boldly  wielding  the  rem- 
nant of  self-respect  —  which  is  divinely  left,  as 
a  nest-egg  of  regeneration,  even  to  the  most 
abandoned  —  impose  on  many  people  with 
what  Coleridge  calls  "  the  ghost  of  virtue 
deceased." 

The  point  of  honor  is  a  shifting  point,  vary- 
ing in  fervor  and  changing  its  place,  according 
to  age  and  country.  In  the  darker,  less  stable 
times  it  is  most  vivid,  and  has  been  especially 
sparkling  and  active  among  the  "  proud  Span- 
iards," thus  revealing,  that  it  is  hatched  in  the 
beetling  eyries  of  pride.  If  too  long  and 
closely  it  haunts  the  rocky  region  of  its  birth, 
it  grows  fantastical  and  tyrannical  and  imprac- 
ti«able,  and  will  lead  him,  who  follows  it  too 
far,  into  ugly  falls.  Like  the  pharos-flame,  it 
may  help  you  through  a  night-tempest  on  a 
dangerous  coast ;  but  its  sole  function  is,  to 
apprise  you  where  you  are,  leaving  to  your  in- 
ward resources  to  work  out  a  safety.  If  rea- 
son and  principle  are  weak  or  overruled,  not 
only  will  it  have  no  power  to  save  you,  but  a 
jack-o'-lantern  will  be  taken  for  a  beacon,  and 


126  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

even  honorable  men  —  misled  by  the  partiali- 
ties and  sinuosities  of  self —  may  be  betrayed, 
by  the  very  point  of  honor,  into  wrongfulness 
and  crime. 

Longer  and  more  numerous  than  were  the 
roads  out  of  Imperial  Rome,  are  the  lines 
whereof  a  cultivated  Christian  is  the  centre, — 
lines  that  connect  him  with  his  neighbors  and 
those  mentally  akin,  and  then,  running  to  all 
corners  of  the  civilized  world,  lose  themselves 
in  the  infinite  and  eternal.  He  is  a  fixed  cen- 
tre, without  definite  circumference,  but  with 
radii  innumerable,  that  are  the  chords  where- 
on play  the  magnetic  currents  of  life  ;  and  ac- 
cording to  the  messages  which  they  carry  or 
bring,  are  a  man's  gains  or  losses,  joys  or  sor- 
rows, improvement  or  declension,  exaltation  or 
humiliation. 

His  personality  is  the  pivot  of  each  man's 
life.  By  the  qualities  that  have  become  asso- 
ciated with  and  the  individuals  who  have  most 
illustrated  it,  the  term  gentleman  implies  an 
elevated,  purified  personality,  and  therewith  a 
constancy  and  manliness  which,  whether  or  not 


PERSONALITY.  127 

they  be  exhibited  in  government  of  others,  im- 
port a  steadfast  command  over  one's  self.  The 
motions  of  a  gentleman  should  be  self-ruled 
with  a  smooth  regality  of  will.  These  mag- 
netic currents  therefore  should,  on  arriving  to 
or  issuing  from  him,  be  commingled  with  and 
controlled  by  a  virile,  individual  virtue,  which 
at  once  beautifies  and  intensifies  their  life.  A 
healthy  gentlemanhood  makes  of  the  heart  a 
centre  so  vivid,  that  it  throws  off"  or  consumes 
all  hurtful  influences. 

We  have  called  honor  the  essence  of  noble 
selfhood,  a  central  feeling,  sterling  and  subtle, 
that  has  its  birth  in  self-regard,  that  looks 
solely  to  itself  for  worth  and  preservation. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  word  honors,  in  the 
plural,  means  a  something  that  comes  from 
abroad,  that  depends  upon  outward  opinion 
and  decision.  A  man  of  honor  may  not  be  a 
man  of  honors ;  though  true  to  his  best  self, 
he  may  not  be,  nor  desire  to  be,  the  object  of 
conspicuous  public  consideration.  His  neigh- 
bor, though  not  a  man  of  honor,  has  honors 
heaped  upon  him,  achieving  and  valuing  an 


128  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

outward  reputation  and  its  fruits.  Well  is  it 
and  significant,  that  one  word  expresses  such 
diverse,  even  opposite,  things,  their  union  be- 
ing needed  to  the  consummation  of  character ; 
for,  a  due  regard  for  general  opinion,  a  sus 
ceptibility  to  censure  or  approval,  if  inwoven 
with  a  full  self-estimation,  enlarges  and  supplies 
without  weakening  the  individuality.  Equi- 
librium between  them  produces  a  graceful 
strength,  and  the  man  is  more  comfortable  to 
himself  as  well  as  to  others  of  whom  it  is  not 
said  that  he  is  proud  or  he  is  vain. 

Pride  isolates :  vanity  diffuses.  Pride  is 
self-satisfied:  vanity  reaches  self-satisfaction 
through  extraneous  satisfaction.  Pride  is  di- 
rect :  vanity  is  circuitous.  Pride  can  array 
itself  in  the  dark :  vanity  must  have  a  look- 
ing-glass. Pride  gives  his  stately  gait  to  the 
Arab :  vanity  puts  paint  on  the  tawny  skin  of 
the  Sioux  warrior,  —  and  on  the  fair,  feminine 
skin  of  tribes  that  live  on  the  Hudson  River. 
A  product  of  vanity  is  Fashion,  which  is  in- 
deed a  conglomerate  of  vanities,  wherein  is 
sparsely  intermingled  the  grit  and  more  often 
the  scoria  of  pride. 


FASHION.  129 

Fashion,  as  the  child  of  vanity,  is  fed  on 
the  transitive  and  showy,  on  superficialities 
and  externalities.  Fashion  is  a  usurpation  of 
the  temporary  over  the  enduring.  It  is  idle- 
ness putting  on  the  airs  of  occupation.  It 
busies  itself  with  the  cut  and  color  of  clothes 
and  furniture,  with  wrappages  and  teguments 
and  redundancies,  ever  seeking,  like  its  mother, 
to  catch  the  eye  with  novelty  and  material 
glare.  It  is  thus  at  points  with  beauty,  which 
is  modest  and  psychical,  as  it  is  with  the  true, 
which  is  unchangeable.  It  is  often  a  rebel 
against  grace  and  a  distorter  of  nature,  but  for 
whose  impregnable  might  and  sleepless,  re- 
stringent,  unavoidable  authority,  it  would  break 
into  intolerable  aberrations  and  illegalities. 
Fashion  and  worldliness  are  inseparable  twins  ; 
or  perhaps  it  were  more  logical  to  regard  their 
relation  as  voluntary,  and  call  them  a  married 
couple, — the  dashing  adventurer,  Worldliness, 
having,  for  a  faster  success,  taken  to  wife  the 
capricious,  cajoling  widow,  Fashion,  (relict  of 
deceased  Earnestness,)  who  submits  to  the 
yoke  for  the  sake  of  the  rule.  At  all  events, 

9 


130  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

the  alliance  between  the  two  is  so  intimate  and 
effective,  that  the  worldly  are  the  most  watch- 
ful observers  of  and  conformists  to  fashion,  de- 
signing thereby  to  gain  for  themselves  protec- 
tion and  consideration  as  the  cheerfully  sub- 
missive subjects  of  a  powerful  despot. 

Fashion  is  sensuous,  and  so  is  doomed  to  an 
endless  search  of  new  stimulants,  which  leads 
to  weariness  and  satiation,  as  these  do  to  cal- 
lousness and  cynicism.  A  sexagenary  of  fash- 
ion is,  from  inherent  sequence,  hard  and  blasS. 
His  best  years  have  been  sucked  of  their 
sweetest  juices  by  the  petulant  fevers  of  levity 
and  ostentation  :  the  ingots  of  his  manhood 
he  has  beaten  into  shallow  gilding  and  fan- 
tastic trinkets.  His  look  into  old  age  is  like 
that  of  a  traveller,  who,  with  his  back  to 
the  green  and  growing  fields,  peers  over  a 
precipice  into  an  extinct  volcano ;  except 
that  the  traveller  can  turn  round  to  enjoy 
again  the  freshness  and  flavor  of  life,  while 
he  has  forfeited  such  liberty,  and  can  only 
regain  it  through  a  heart-shaking,  individual, 
moral  revulsion,  which  shall  rekindle  in  him 


FASHION.  131 

the  long  -  smothered  flames  of  sympathy  and 
faith. 

The  tyranny  of  fashion  disheartens  and  per- 
verts the  best  ladyhood  and  gentlemanhood : 
its  predominance  is  a  sign  of  spiritual  weak 
ness.  For  gentlemen  to  give  way  to  it  unto 
subjection,  is  a  partial  abdication  of  the  social 
throne.  Their  part  is,  to  rule,  not  to  be  ruled, 
—  to  rule  quietly,  imperceptibly,  but  not  the 
less  potently,  over  modes  and  socialities  and 
aesthetic  secularities,  —  to  rule  through  inward, 
rightful  empire,  whereof  demeanor  is  but  a 
partial  outward  expression.  Do  they  cease  to 
be  initiators  and  foremen,  their  rank  is  for- 
feited, and  gentlemanhood,  shaken  in  its  up- 
rightness and  its  independence,  loses  its  pres- 
tige, and  the  social  tone  is  lowered. 

The  good  there  is  in  things  evil  may  be  dis- 
covered to  lie  here  in  the  drawing  together, 
the  feeling  together,  the  acting  together  of  a 
large  multitude  not  otherwise  in  harmony.  In 
the  vast  extension,  in  latter  times,  of  the  do- 
minion of  fashion,  the  thoughtful  and  hopeful 
may  discern  a  wide,  lively  power  of  cob'pera- 


132  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

tion,  preluding,  as  it -were,  in  a  superficial  ex- 
hibition, for  a  deep  beneficent  display  of  asso- 
ciative virtue  ;  and  even  see  a  significant  sym- 
bol in  a  monstrosity  of  apparel,  interpreting 
the  circumvestment  of  the  globe  with  crinoline 
into  a  prefigurement  of  world-encircling  intel- 
lectual and  moral  bonds. 

The  gentleman  being  genuine  through  in- 
born qualities  well  cultivated,  is  not  imitable 
except  in  his  surfaces,  life  not  being  imitable 
but  only  life's  integuments ;  and  fashion  deal- 
ing with  perishable  outsides,  striving  ever  with 
a  restless  multitudinous  effort  to  make  appear- 
ance do  the  work  of  substance,  becomes  the 
parent  of  vulgarities.  A  gentleman  may  be 
disagreeable,  he  may  be  coarse  on  occasion,  he 
may  be  rough,  rude,  even  for  the  moment  un- 
gentlemanly,  —  so  fallible  are  men, —  but  he 
cannot  be  vulgar.  What  is  vulgar,  —  what  is 
vulgarity  ? 

The  opposite  of  beauty  is  ugliness ;  but 
neither  is  ugliness  of  itself  vulgar,  nor  he  who 
is  content  with  it.  But  when  to  a  deficient 
sense  of  the  beautiful  is  joined  the  pretension 


VULGARITY.  133 

to  possess  it,  there  is  a  beginning  of  vulgarity, 
which  blows  out  into  full  grossness  when  there 
follows  a  self-sufficient  vainglorious  display  of 
the  pretension.  A  man  is  vulgar,  not  because 
he  has  no  sense  of  beauty  in  conduct  or  bear- 
ing, but  because,  not  having  any,  he  wishes 
ambitiously  or  ostentatiously  to  seem  to  have. 
Vulgarity  thus  consists  in  a  pretentious,  obtuse 
conceit :  it  is  an  attempt  to  be  what  from  aes- 
thetic deficiency  one  cannot  be,  accompanied 
by  unconsciousness  of  the  impotency,  —  a  sort 
of  open-eyed  blindness  that  leads  to  the  com- 
mission of  numberless  petty  enormities.  A 
man  will  spend  half  a  million  on  pictures,  and 
have  a  gallery  of  daubs.  He  is  vulgar,  not 
because  he  has  bought  bad  pictures,  —  which 
he  might  do  from  indifference  or  misplaced  be- 
nevolence, to  assist  incapable  artists, — but  be- 
cause, not  having  a  sense,  and  a  cultivated 
sense,  of  beauty,  from  obtuseness  he  believes 
that  he  has,  impelled  by  vanity  to  affect  a  sen- 
sibility which  he  has  not. 

There  is  no  necessary  connection  between 
vulgarity  and  humbleness  of  birth.     Day-la- 


134  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

borers  are  even  less  liable  to  exhibit  vulgarity 
than  other  classes,  who,  from  their  better 
worldly  position  are  tempted  to  affect  to  be 
still  higher  than  they  are.  The  hard-working 
masses  are  too  much  straitened  for  affecta- 
tion. Humbleness  of  station  is,  in  choice  na- 
tures, compensated  by  an  elevating  humility. 
Nature,  moreover,  has  no  more  respect  for  our 
emblazoned  dignities  than  a  conflagration  has 
for  the  title-deeds  of  a  Barony.  Out  of  a 
room  full  of  Dukes  and  Earls,  Charles  Lamb 
would  have  been  picked  as  the  man  of  the 
whole  company  whose  physiognomy,  carriage, 
and  speech  most  strongly  illustrated  the  oppo- 
site of  vulgarity.  The  intellectual  sparkle  of 
his  countenance,  clarified,  transfigured,  by  a 
light  ever  flaming  outward  from  the  beautiful, 
was  tempered  by  an  expression  drawn  from 
moral  depths,  that  told  of  tragic  trials  hero- 
ically withstood.  The  vulgar  man's  face  is  no 
tablet  for  recording  aspirations  and  trials.  His 
desires  are  gross,  his  ambitions  worldly,  his 
disappointments  earthy. 

Vulgarity  implies  shallowness  of  nature  and 


VULGARITY.  135 

therewith  crudeness  of  performance,  its  chief 
domain  being  the  more  exposed  phenomena  of 
social  life,  which  afford  a  field  for  the  display 
of  minor  vanities  and  pretensions  and  impu- 
dences. The  vulgar  man  is  not  civil,  he  is 
officious,  and,  from  doltish  indelicacy,  is  prone 
to  meddling,  and  thus  becomes  at  times  offen- 
sive as  well  as  ridiculous.  Moderation,  mod- 
esty, unobtrusiveness  being  characteristics  of 
gentlemanhood,  vulgarity  shows  itself  in  the 
contraries  of  over-doing  and  excess. 

Over-dressing  is  vulgar,  especially  in  wom- 
en, for  the  glare  of  the  sun-lit  and  eye-lit 
street.  Toilets,  even  when  tasteful  as  to  col- 
or and  style,  denote,  if  habitually  rich  and 
showy,  mental  vulgarity,  their  transparent  de- 
sign being  by  superficial  material  means  to  im- 
press the  beholder.  The  refined  beholder  is 
unfavorably  impressed,  suspecting  such  out- 
ward richness  (except  on  grand  gala-days)  to 
be  the  mask  of  inward  poverty ;  and  regard- 
ing simplicity  of  dress  in  the  wealthy  as  a 
promise  of  wealth  in  resources  of  heart  and 
head.  In  individual  instances  he  may  err  on 


136  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

either  side,  but  a  prevalent  fashion  of  costly 
dressing  is  a  sign  of  general  vulgarity.  The 
finest  type  of  ladyhood  would  recoil  offended 
from  her  mirror  at  seeing  herself  besilked  and 
befeathered  and  bejewelled  for  a  morning  walk 
or  drive.  She  will  be  as  simply  elegant  in  her 
attire,  in  doors  or  out,  as  in  her  manners  ;  will 
not  exhibit,  either  in  the  one  or  the  other,  the 
slightest  effort  to  outvie  her  neighbors;  will 
show  her  mind,  and  will  charm,  by  the  taste- 
ful selection  and  combination  of  refined  ma- 
terials, and  weakens  not  her  native  dignity 
and  personal  attractiveness,  by  the  costliness 
or  showiness  of  her  raiment.  In  her  apparel 
will  be  expressed  the  modesty  and  chasteness 
of  her  nature,  and  she  will  blush  to  be  obliged, 
(which  no  lady  should  allow  herself  to  be,)  to 
conform  to  the  fashion  of  very  "  low  dress- 
ing,"—  an  exposure,  the  immodest  purport  of 
which  "jumps  into  the  eyes"  of  the  spectator 
at  a  Paris  Bed  Mobile. 

Natures  there  are  so  gross  and  egotistic 
and  unspiritual,  that  even  a  sense  of  beauty 
(shown,  however,  in  the  material  and  fugitive) 


VULGARITY.  137 

cannot  save  them  from  vulgarity;  as  if  to 
bear  witness  —  and  the  more  emphatically  be- 
cause exceptionally  —  that  the  foundations  of 
all  best  manhood  rest  on  the  moral. 

A.  large  proportion  of  vulgarity  is  negative  ; 
that  is,  in  the  demeanor  there  is  no  ambitious 
effort,  which  makes  conspicuous  the  aesthetic 
obtuseness,  but  this  obtuseness  and  want  of 
social  culture  become  transparent  through 
juxtaposition  with  refinement.  The  individ- 
uals do  not  actively,  eagerly  affect  to  be 
what  they  are  not ;  but  yet,  being  where, 
from  obvious  deficiency,  they  are  out  of  place, 
there  is,  by  their  mere  presence,  a  seeming  to 
be  what  they  are  not,  and  thus  is  fulfilled  the 
chief  condition  of  vulgarity.  Some  people  may 
be  said  to  be  modestly  vulgar. 

In  language  vulgarity  shows  itself,  not  so 
much  in  the  use  of  coarse  or  inappropriate 
words  or  of  low  or  uneducated  phrases,  as  of 
such  as  denote  a  falling  from  the  refined  stand- 
ard through  aesthetic  incapacity.  Vocally  to 
add  an  h  to  monosyllables  or  polysyllables  be- 
ginning with  a  vowel,  or  to  interchange  w  and 


138  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

v,  is  a  grievous  lapse  from  the  elocution  of  the 
English  tongue,  betokening  lack  of  sensibility 
to  the  beauty  and  proprieties  of  speech.  Per- 
sons guilty  of  these  oral  crimes  are  uncon- 
scious of  having  committed  any  breach  of 
law ;  but  this  unconsciousness,  evincing  aes- 
thetic hebetude,  is  the  essence  of  the  vulgar- 
ity. These  and  similar  vices  in  phrase  or  elo- 
cution are  endurable  in  Fleet  Street  or  Smith- 
field  Market,  where  the  mind's  verbal  utter- 
ances are  curtailed  and  despoiled  by  the  gross 
simplicity  of  its  needs  and  the  maiming  routine 
of  its  work ;  but  when  in  a  drawing-room  of 
Mayfair  or  Belgravia  they  assail  the  ears  of  a 
scholarly  gentleman,  he  experiences  a  distress- 
ful shock,  and  his  first  motion  is  to  treat  the 
culprit  as  the  "  conductor  "  treats  a  passenger 
without  a  ticket.  Luminous  atmosphere  brings 
out  vulgarity,  as  varnish  the  lights  and  shadows 
of  a  picture. 


X. 


VARIOUS  KINDS  OP  GENTLEMEN  —  FRAGMENTS  —  LADYHOOD  —  CON- 
CLUSION. 

TTTHAT  is  so  deep  and  so  alive  with  prin- 
ciple and  power  as  gentlemanhood  will, 
in  the  multiplicity  of  its  combinations  with  ac- 
tion, exhibit  itself  in  a  vast  variety  of  personal 
and  social  phenomena,  modified  endlessly  by 
individualities.  A  brief  characterization  of 
some  of  the  embodiments  thus  thrown  up  on 
the  social  surface  will  help  to  illustrate  the 
principle  —  illustrations  which  are  partial  and 
limited,  and  must  by  no  means  be  taken  for  an 
attempt  at  a  full  classification  of  gentlemen,  — 
an  attempt,  the  success  whereof  were  very 
problematical,  and  which  is  altogether  too  am- 
bitious for  our  present  purpose. 

First  then  we  will  name  the  conservative 
gentleman,  —  but  the  crowd  of  gentlemen 
"who"  dress  "with  ease"  are  conservative, 
jealous  of  encroachment,  suspicious  of  change. 


140  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

The  gentleman  has  not  necessarily  a  big  brain, 
and  we  once  read  an  apt  description  of  an  in- 
dividual, as  having  a  smallish,  well -shaped, 
gentlemanly  head.  Were  there  not  now  and 
then  a  big  brain  amongst  them,  the  whole 
company  would  shrivel  ;  while,  on  the  other 
hand,  some  who  are  not  of  the  largest  intel- 
lectual calibre  are  lifted  into  the  advocacy  of 
great  causes  and  great  changes  by  generosity 
and  courage  of  nature,  like  Mathieu  de  Mont- 
morenci  and  Lafayette,  two  shining  examples 
of  gentlemanhood,  —  select  compatriots  of  Co- 
ligny  and  Bayard. 

The  conventional  gentleman,  a  stickler  for 
forms  and  conformity,  somewhat  stiff  and  set, 
is  apt  to  be  timorous,  and  thence  overrates 
the  past  and  distrusts  the  future.  He  mag- 
nifies the  quiet  deeds  of  the  drawing-room, 
together  with  the  whole  social  apparatus  of 
visiting,  small  talk  and  various  dressing; 
thinks  punctilios  terrestrial  pivots  ;  prefers  the 
superficial  to  the  profound,  not  being  adven- 
turous enough  to  learn,  that  it  is  as  easy  to 
swim  in  deep  water  as  shallow,  —  nay,  easier. 


VARIOUS  KINDS  OF  GENTLEMEN.     141 

The  excitable  gentleman  is  a  variety  uncom- 
fortable at  times  to  himself  and  to  others,  his 
irrepressible,  nervous  vivacity  running  over, 
like  the  steam  that  noisily  escapes  from  the 
lid  of  a  teapot.  An  essential,  almost  a  con- 
dition, of  gentlemanliness  being  self-possession, 
he  finds  himself  frequently  on  the  edge  of  a 
momentary  forfeiture  of  his  rank. 

A  variety  more  to  be  pitied  is  the  dyspeptic. 
gentleman,  he  being  subject  to  constant  self- 
reproaches  and  contritions  from  minor  breaches 
of  the  convenances,  through  petulance  and 
crossness  caused  by  bodily  malaise. 

The  idle  gentleman,  not  having  within  him- 
self wherewith  to  feed  his  mind,  comes  upon 
the  town  (your  gentleman  about  town)  and  has 
to  be  mentally  supported  by  the  community. 

The  retrospective  gentleman  is  a  subvariety 
of  the  conservative ;  or,  we  might  say,  a  su- 
pervariety,  seeing  that,  in  the  tenacity  of  his 
conservatism,  he  becomes  a  scoffer  and  denier 
of  the  present.  Each  new  day  steals  upon 
him  like  a  thief,  who  comes  to  purloin  some- 
thing of  the  precious  past.  As  the  waves  of 


142  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

time  roll  in  from  the  menacing  future,  he  ever 
dreads  an  inundation ;  and  standing  with  his 
back  scornfully  turned  towards  the  encroach- 
ment, and  his  eyes  half-closed,  the  better  to 
hold  the  mental  images  of  the  irrecoverable 
past,  and  his  ears  untuned,  except  to  the  songs 
of  bygone  joys,  he  is  liable  to  get  individually 
swamped  by  the  purges  that  bring  refreshment 
and  vigor  to  all  around  him.  Striving  to  draw 
fragrance  and  nourishment  out  of  memories  and 
preterperfect  imaginations,  he  walks  through 
the  present  as  a  fine  lady  through  a  malodor- 
ous alley. 

The  eccentric  gentleman,  when  not  a  man 
of  wit  or  genius,  must  at  least  be  of  more  than 
common  cleverness.  An  eccentric  fool  or  me- 
diocrity will  not  be  -tolerated.  The  eccentri- 
city of  a  gentleman  is  the  humorous  enjoyment 
of  the  freedom  which  is  the  privilege  of  spirit- 
ual superiority.  Were  all  men  as  free  as  he, 
there  would  be  no  eccentricity,  each  pursuing 
his  individual  path  without  disturbance  of  other 
orbits,  all  being  concentric  about  a  remote  pre- 
dominant power. 


VARIOUS  KINDS  OF  GENTLEMEN.    143 

The  courteous  gentleman  sounds  like  a  pleo- 
nasm. But  all  gentlemen  are  not  courteous, 
nor  is  courtesy  a  profound  quality  of  gentle- 
manhood.  Courtesy,  originating  at  courts,  im- 
plies a  dignified,  respectful,  high-bred  manner, 
acquired  in  an  atmosphere  of  ceremony ;  and 
is  thus  rather  self-regardful  and  self-protective 
than  kindly,  —  stately  and  proud,  rather  than 
gentle  and  winning.  The  high-bred  man  is  not 
necessarily  the  best-bred  man,  and  a  genial 
gentleman  is  a  finer  type  than  a  courteous. 
Indeed  courtesy  is  comparatively  conventional 
and  superficial. 

The  type  of  the  superfine  gentleman  is  given 
by  Hotspur  in  his  description  of  "  a  certain 
lord,  neat,  trimly  dressed,  fresh  as  a  bride- 
groom," who  questioned  him,  smarting  from 
wounds,  with  "  holiday  and  lady  terms."  He 
looks  as  though  he  had  just  been  rubbed  all 
over  with  pumice.  You  would  say  that  for 
his  toilet  the  milliner  had  been  called  in  to 
help  the  tailor.  His  laugh  is  only  an  audible 
smile ;  his  breath  is  too  precious  for  speech 
much  louder  than  a  whisper ;  and  a  strong 


144  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

epithet  grates  on  his  nerves  like  profanity  on 
the  ears  of  a  pious  woman. 

To  speak  of  the  pushing  gentleman  is  a 
semi-solecism ;  but  in  treating  of  gentlemen, 
it  becomes  us  to  use  liberally  the  gentlemanly 
virtues  of  tolerance  and  forbearance.  Having 
the  essentials,  we  can  put  up  with  aberrations 
that  do  not  deaden  them,  inconsistencies  that 
are  not  so  trenchant  as  to  be  chaotic,  and  par- 
tial infringements.  Let  not,  therefore,  a  gen- 
tleman be  cashiered  for  being  on  unfrequent 
occasions  a  little  pushing. 

The  evil  in  men  is  so  neighbored,  by  good, 
—  and  often  by  a  kind  and  degree  of  good 
least  looked  for,  —  that,  learning  charity  from 
a  discriminative  experience,  we  find  the  judg- 
ment will  miscarry,  even  in  what  is  such  a 
product  of  beauty  practically  cultivated  as  the 
gentleman,  if  we  judge  without  a  considerate 
tolerance  ;  while  with  this,  we  shall  sometimes 
have  the  pleasant  surprise  of  detecting  a  gen- 
tleman in  a  man  who  blows  his  nose  with  his 
fingers,  or  wills  his  fortune  to  his  wife  during 
widowhood. 


FRAGMENTS.  145 

In  the  evolution  of  a  strong,  rich  subject, 
fragments  will  be  thrown  off  that  exhibit  its 
inmost  grain,  and  thus  serve,  as  well  as  what 
has  been  smoothly  incorporated,  to  elucidate 
it;  and,  having  issued  from  the  mind  of  the 
writer  when  in  warm  vibration,  help  that  of 
the  reader  to  give  clearness  and  completeness 
to  the  image  he  draws  out  of  the  pages  before 
him.  Some  such  fragments,  that  seem  best 
fitted  for  this  end,  we  here  insert. 

The  polish  of  a  gentleman  is  a  refined  effect 
from  within,  as  different  from  the  servile  ac- 
commodations of  fashion,  or  the  unctious  lu- 
brications of  worldliness,  as  the  gloss  on  the 
cheek  of  healthful  innocence  is  from  the  cos- 
metics of  vanity.  The  word  polish  does  not 
rightly  characterize  the  condition,  which  is  an 
effluence,  a  perpetually  renewed  freshness  and 
fragrance,  whereof  the  subject  is  as  unconscious 
as  the  pine-tree  of  its  perfume. 

Manners  should  be  more  felt  than  seen : 
they  depend  for  their  excellence  as  much  on 
what  is  not  done  or  said  as  on  what  is.  The 
man  of  the  best  manners  has  no  thought  of  his 

10 


146  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

manners,  nor  do  you  perceive  that  he  ever  has 
had,  so  perfect  in  him  is  the  marriage  between 
nature  and  discipline.  His  manners  are  not 
put  on  with  his  dress-coat :  they  are  ingrained, 
and  are  spontaneous,  like  his  talk. 

A  gentleman  is  cleanly  and  comely,  all  his 
outward,  of  dress,  bearing,  and  speech,  be- 
tokening simplicity  and  inward  cleanliness. 
Gaudy  or  flashy  apparel  suggests,  if  it  does 
not  denote,  interior  flimsiness  or  meretricious- 
ness,  which  is  a  deduction  from  gentleman- 
hood.  The  artificial  becomes  not  the  gentle- 
man, who,  if  he  wears  a  wig,  wears  it  for  use, 
not  for  show,  as  Washington  wore  false  teeth. 

In  a  hearty  gentleman  there  are  no  little- 
nesses. The  minor  details  of  his  life  are  not 
mean :  they  are  petty,  not  pitiful.  In  order 
that  he  seem  large,  distance  and  ceremony  are 
not  needed.  He  is  a  hero  to  his  valet  de 
chambre,  if  he  happens  to  have  one.  Nay, 
he  is  a  gentleman  to  himself. 

The  gentleman  is  not  too  subjective :  he  is 
able,  and  likes,  to  go  out  of  himself,  and  see 
things  as  they  are,  unrefracted  by  his  particu- 


FRAGMENTS.  147 

lar  desires  or  prepossessions,  surveying  them 
with  indulgence.  The  man  -who  forever  hugs 
his  own  conclusions,  is  but  a  beggarly  gentle- 
man. 

The  gentleman  is,  above  all  things,  free.  A 
slave,  therefore,  he  must  not  be  to  things  any 
more  than  to  persons,  not  to  conventionalities 
or  fashions  any  more  than  to  kings  or  patrons. 
He  is  first  of  all  a  man,  and  to  be  a  man  he 
must  be  a  freeman,  above  voluntary  subser- 
vience. Through  involuntary  servitude  the 
gentleman  shines  undimmed,  as  did  Cervantes 
through  his  Algerine  chains.  In  presence  of 
the  grandeurs  of  the  world  he  is  as  unmoved 
as  a  Mohawk,  and  dines  from  dishes  of  gold  or 
talks  to  a  king  without  constraint. 

Every  gentleman  will  not  always  be  above 
selfishness,  and,  from  their  aggregate  qualifi- 
cations, men  may  bear  unchallenged  the  choice 
appellation,  who  will  at  times  use  their  oppor- 
tunities for  their  own  advantage.  But  a  gen- 
tleman will  be  negatively  rather  than  posi- 
tively selfish.  He  may  dine  oftener  than  one 
with  disinterested  digestion  would  on  capon 


148  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

and  Burgundy ;  but  he  will  not  rob  a  hen- 
roost. 

A  gentleman  may  brush  his  own  shoes  or 
clothes,  or  mend  or  make  them,  or  roughen  his 
hands  with  the  helve,  or  foul  them  with  dye- 
work  or  iron-work ;  but  he  may  not  foul  his 
mouth  with  a  lie, — he  must  not  lie,  he  need 
not  lie,  even  in  the  year  186-. 

There  is  no  sinister  or  even  wayward 
shifting  in  the  true  gentleman.  You  know 
where  to  have  him.  He  is  sensitive  to  the 
pressure  of  responsibilities.  The  sense  of 
dutifulness  elevates  his  conduct  into  serious 
activity. 

Although  not  demanded  for  his  qualification, 
generosity  amplifies  the  gentleman.  But  men 
wanting  in  spiritual  liberality,  who  are  not 
ready  with  acknowledgment  of  merit,  who 
make  of  envy  a  bosom-companion,  whose  ap- 
probation is  centred  in  themselves,  are  but 
halting,  laggart,  niggardly  gentlemen.  Admi- 
ration and  reverence  are  uplifting  elements  in 
gentlemanhood. 

His  gentlemanhood  is  finally  judged,  not  by 


FRAGMENTS.  149 

what  a  man  has  by  possession  or  inheritance  or 
opportunity,  but  by  what  he  is. 

The  gentleman  is  fine  in  bis  delicacy,  "wounds 
no  one's  sensibilities,  asks  neither  intrusive  nor 
unfeeling  questions,  is  never  over-curious  or  in- 
terrogative, carries  unselfishness  into  small, 
daily  things,  giving  kindliness  to  common  acts 
and  sincerity  to  politeness. 

A  gentleman  of  the  best  type  is  habitually 
accommodating  and  considerate,  prompt  for 
petty  service  as  well  as  capable  of  large.  In 
his  heart  there  is  a  central  tenderness  which  is 
ever  percolating  in  lively  streams  to  the  sur- 
face, making  his  demeanor  sympathetic  and 
welcome.  The  refined  generosity,  the  spon- 
taneous unselfishness,  that  characterize  the 
gentleman  of  the  purest  type,  were  illustrated 
with  beautiful  originality  in  the  practice  of  an 
eminent  Frenchman,  who  forty  years  ago  was 
Minister  from  France  to  the  United  States, 
and  who  afterwards  filled  high  official  posts  at 
home  under  the  elder  Bourbons,  —  M.  Hyde 
de  Neuville.  In  the  streets  of  Paris  he  had 
the  habit  of  offering  his  umbrella  to  the  first 


150  THE   GENTLEMAN. 

woman  he  met  without  one  in  the  rain,  flis 
name  and  address,  distinctly  printed  on  the 
edge  of  the  silk,  he  pointed  out  to  the  sur- 
prised grateful  recipient.  M.  de  Neuville  said 
that,  often  as  he  had  thus  lent  his  umbrella  to 
strangers,  in  no  single  instance  had  there  been 
a  failure  to  return  it,  —  another  proof  how 
trust  will  beget  honesty. 

The  gentleman  will  have  an  educated  face  ; 
not  that  we  are  to  see  on  his  forehead  the 
sprouting  of  Greek  roots  or  the  shooting  of 
mathematical  lines,  but  from  his  countenance 
will  beam  a  tranquil  light,  kindled  from  a  long 
inward  interplay  of  thought  with  refined  feel- 
ings, and  fanned  by  breaths  from  without  that 
have  passed  over  fields  well  set  with  the  finer 
fruits  and  flowers  of  life.  His  visage  is  a  mir- 
ror which,  having  the  capacity  to  reflect  gentle 
and  beautiful  forms  and  images,  shows  that  it 
has  often  fronted  them. 

The  gentleman,  being  a  product  of  emotional 
refinement,  must  breathe,  in  order  to  keep  his 
freshness,  an  atmosphere  not  entirely  uncon- 
genial to  him.  Sir  Philip  Sidney  could  not 


FRAGMENTS.  151 

have  preserved  all  his  gentlemanly  lustre,  if,  on 
returning  from  his  travels,  he  had  been  obliged 
to  consort  daily  and  intimately  with  the  fre- 
quenters of  Lombard  Street. 

So  free  should  be  the  gentleman's  thought, 
so  authoritative  his  inward  over  his  outward, 
that  he  should  possess  all  things  as  not  possess- 
ing any.  He  claims  to  be  better  than  the 
crowd  about  him.  To  approve  his  claim,  he 
must  strive  upward  ever,  must  keep  bettering 
himself,  like  Prospero;  and  thus  he  may  at- 
tain to  something  of  Prospero's  magical  power. 

What  a  classic  is  among  books  a  thorough 
gentleman  is  among  men,  —  precious  metal 
finely  wrought.  Between  his  mind  and  his 
manners,  —  the  inward  and  outward,  the  spirit 
and  form, — there  is  a  graceful  consonance,  the 
result  of  proportion  and  discipline,  the  texture 
being  of  that  high  quality  which  admits  of  and 
invites  delicate  manipulation. 

A  community  or  people  that  cannot  produce 
and  maintain  gentlemen,  is  doomed  to  a  sapless 
mediocrity. 

The  gentleman  is  grounded  on  a  Christian 


152  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

basis  of  manly  individualism,  irradiated  by  sus- 
ceptibility to  the  beautiful  in  feeling  and  con- 
duct, which  susceptibility  has  the  virtue  to 
draw  him  out  of  himself,  stimulating  those 
powers  in  him  which  lift  a  man  into  the 
broad  and  universal. 

Deep  are  the  conditions,  slow  the  prepara- 
tions for  the  planting  and  maturing  of  the  most 
precious  things.  Hundreds  of  centuries  were 
silently  consumed  ere  the  gases  of  the  seeth- 
ing earth  could  be  purged  and  rarefied  to  be  fit 
to  feed  the  life  of  a  being  so  subtly  organized 
as  man.  Centuries  of  Christian  culture  pre- 
cede the  permanent  production  of  a  class  of 
gentlemen,  whose  existence  presupposes  the 
transmitted  discipline  of  many  generations. 
The  gentleman  has  a  long  line  of  ancestors,  — 
not  necessarily  his  bodily,  but  his  mental  pro- 
genitors. From  all  classes  spring  individuals 
with  such  delicate  affinities,  that  without  family 
affiliations  they  grow  quickly  into  membership 
and  even  leadership  of  the  choice  class,  having 
in  their  temperament  a  capacity  to  absorb  and 
assimilate  the  emanations  of  gentlemanhood. 


LADYHOOD  153 

In  these  latter  "  fast "  days,  especially  in  confi- 
dent hurrying  America,  men  are  all  eager 
to  be  something,  everything,  -without  going 
through  the  process  of  becoming  it ;  as  though 
they  could  overleap  the  universal  law  of 
growth,  —  as  though  we  could  know  much 
without  having  learnt  much.  I  once  heard  an 
eminent  American  say,  that  our  country  is  full 
of  people  who  wish  to  be  gentlemen ;  —  a  most 
creditable  ambition  assuredly.  But  for  the 
most  part  they  set  about  compassing  their 
wish  by  easy,  gross,  and  most  barren  monetary 
means,  instead  of  striking  into  the  only  path 
that  leads  to  its  attainment,  —  a  patient  culti- 
vation of  the  finer  and  better  sensibilities  and 
a  severe,  unremitting  self-culture. 

We  have  said  little  of  ladyhood,  because  it 
runs  side  by  side  with  gentlemanhood.  But 
ladyhood  is  a  something  of  still  finer  quality, 
woman's  sensibilities  being  more  tender,  her 
aspirations  more  generous,  her  whole  nature 
more  diflusely  and  delicately  dyed  with  beauty. 
Her  being  is  spiritualized  by  the  holiness  of 
the  maternal  function.  The  bride's  love  and 


154  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

the  mother's  love  sweeten  and  elevate  her 
needs  and  occupations.  From  her  greater  mo- 
bility, impressibility,  pliability,  she  has  more 
tact  and  gracefulness,  and  takes  a  polish  more 
quickly,  her  demeanor  being  further  burnished 
by  her  readiness  to  please  and  to  be  pleased. 
Sensitiveness  and  susceptivity,  which  are  such 
rapid  educators,  are  more  native  and  necessary 
to  her  than  to  her  companion ;  while  on  the 
other  hand,  being  so  impressible  and  suscipient, 
she  is  even  more  exposed  than  he  to  be  in- 
fluenced, and  so  it  may  be,  to  be  defiled  or 
discolored,  by  the  circumstances  and  agencies 
immediately  around  her.  Her  purity  and  mod- 
esty—  without  which  she  is  a  distempered  joy, 
a  flavorless  fruit,  a  leafless  paradise,  a  baffled 
expectation  —  are  a  treasure  upon  whose  se- 
curity depends  that  of  all  the  best  possessions 
of  social  life,  and  among  these,  ladyhood,  with 
its  inculpable  spells,  its  profitable  attractions, 
it«  sanatory  fascinations. 

From  the  greater  ductility,  the  livelier  aes- 
thetic educability  of  women ;  from  the  com- 
parative seclusion  of  their  walks  of  life,  their 


CONCLUSION.  155 

only  partial  participation  in  the  general  coarse 
money-scramble,  they  spending  the  gold  which 
their  fathers  and  husbands  have  gathered, — 
in  exchange  often  for  their  souls,  —  ladies  are 
in  any  given  community  more  numerous  than 
gentlemen.  In  Europe  American  women  are 
socially  much  more  successful  than  American 
men,  bringing  into  the  circles  into  which  they 
may  be  admitted,  sensibilities  better  cultivated, 
as  well  as  quicker  to  appropriate  the  finer 
usages  of  an  old  traditional  society.  From 
the  .  same  causes,  of  that  prosperous  class, 
comically  called  "  Beggars  on  horseback," 
a  minority  will  be  found  to  ride  on  side-sad- 
dles. 

A  few  compendious  paragraphs,  and  our  es- 
say is  ended. 

The  gentleman  is  never  unduly  familiar ; 
takes  no  liberties ;  is  chary  of  questions ;  is 
neither  artificial  nor  affected;  is  as  little  ob- 
trusive upon  the  mind  or  feelings  of  others  as 
on  their  persons  ;  bears  himself  tenderly  tow- 
ards the  weak  and  unprotected ;  is  not  arro- 
gant, cannot  be  supercilious ;  can  be  self-de- 


156  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

nying  without  struggle ;  is  not  vain  of  hia 
advantages,  extrinsic  or  personal ;  habitually 
subordinates  his  lower  to  his  higher  self;  is, 
in  his  best  condition,  electric  with  truth,  buoy- 
ant with  veracity. 

Gentlemanhood  is  not  compassed  by  imita- 
tion, because  inward  life  is  not  imitable ;  nor 
is  it  purchasable,  because  refinement  cannot 
be  bought ;  nor,  but  partially  inheritable,  be- 
cause nature  discountenances  monopolies.  It 
is  not  superficial,  its  externals  being  the  tokens 
of  internal  needs,  its  embellishments  part  and 
parcel  of  its  substance.  Akin  to  architecture 
and  poetry,  as  having  its  source  in  use  and 
truth  -sublimated  by  beauty,  its  adornments, 
like  those  of  a  chaste  cathedral  or  a  high 
epic,  are  congenital  with  its  essence,  out-flow- 
ings  from  its'  inmost,  captivating  symmetries, 
that  are  captivating  and  symmetrical  because 
they  are  the  exuberant  utterance  of  an  inward 
grace,  —  a  living  effluence,  not  the  superad- 
ditions  of  effort  and  calculation  and  vanity. 
The  gentleman  makes  manliness  attractive  by 
Beemliness :  he  exemplifies,  in  the  words  of 


CONCLUSION.  157 

Sidney,  "  high  thoughts  seated  in  a  heart  of 
courtesy." 

In  all  intercourse  no  armor  is  so  becoming 
and  so  protective  as  a  gentlemanly  demeanor ; 
and  when  we  think,  how  intimate,  diversified, 
unavoidable,  indispensable,  how  daily  and  hour- 
ly are  our  relations  with  our  fellow-men,  we 
cannot  but  become  aware,  how  much  it  con- 
cerns us,  for  our  pleasure  and  our  profit,  and 
for  a  deeper  satisfaction,  to  be  affable  and  gen- 
tlemanly, and  arm  ourselves  with  a  bearing 
that  shall  be  the  expression  of  self-respect, 
purified  by  respect  for  others. 

Stripped  of  all  that  is  adventitious  and  con- 
ventional, there  is  in  the  word  gentleman,  a 
lofty  ideal,  which  may  be,  and  is,  more  or  less 
realized  in  the  conduct  and  carriage  of  indi- 
viduals ;  and  which  finds  expression,  not 
through  mere  shallow  civility  and  verbal  po- 
liteness, but  through  a  gentle,  kindly  bearing 
in  all  intercourse,  the  outward  mark  of  inward 
fellow-feeling.  From  this  cordial  sentiment 
spring  blossoms  and  flowers  of  spiritual  beauty, 
that  are  captivating  ornaments  to  the  person, 


158  THE  GENTLEMAN. 

and  exhale  an  atmosphere  of  refinement  and 
tenderness,  wherein  the  harsher  self  is  soothed 
into  disinterestedness  and  devotion. 

At  the  root  of  gentlemanhood,  in  a  soil  of 
deep,  moral  inwardness,  lies  a  high  self-respect, 
—  not  the  pert  spoiled  child  of  individual  self- 
estimation,  —  but  a  growth  from  the  conscious- 
ness of  illimitable  claims  as  an  independent, 
infinite  soul.  The  gentleman  is  a  Christian 
product. 

His  high  exemplar  is  He,  who  delivered  the 
precept,  as  fresh  as,  since  him,  we  know  it  to 
be  vast  and  deep  and  true,  —  whosoever  would 
reign ,  let  him  serve,  —  proving  its  sublime 
force,  by  establishing,  through  such  service  as 
has  never  elsewhere  been  seen,  a  reign,  to 
which  the  sway  of  all  the  kings  that  have  been 
crowned  on  the  earth  is  empty  and  theatrical ; 
who  from  the  deeps  of  one  heart  poured  a  love 
so  warm  and  divine,  that  it  became  for  man- 
kind a  consecration;  who  up  to  his  resplend- 
ent solitary  summit,  far  above  all  thrones  and 
principalities,  carried  a  humility  so  noble,  a 
sympathy  so  fraternal,  that  he  looked  down 


CONCLUSION.  159 

upon  no  man,  not  even  a  malefactor ;  who  re- 
buked the  arrogant  and  upraised  the  lowly ;  by 
the  spiritual  splendor  of  whose  being  the  ages 
are  lighted  upward  forever  ;  who  in  his  manly 
tenderness,  his  celestial  justice,  stretched  forth 
a  hand  that  lifted  woman  to  her  equal  place  ; 
who  to  his  disciples,  and  by  them  through  all 
time  to  all  other  men  that  shall  be  truly  his 
disciples,  gave  his  peace,  that  peace  which  the 
world  cannot  give;  in  whose  look  and  word 
and  action  were  supreme  dignity  and  beauty 
and  charity,  and  infinite  consolation  ;  of  whom 
"  old  honest  Deckar  "  says,  — 

"  The  best  of  men 

•  That  ere  wore  earth  about  him  was  a  sufferer, 
A  soft,  meek,  patient,  humble,  tranquil  spirit, 
The  first  true  gentleman  that  ever  breathed." 


THE  ENTD. 


135,  U?as!jfnflton  St.,  Uoston, 
APKIL,  1864. 

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